The Windsor Knot

15

“It’s nothing to do with the Russian,” Sir Simon assured the Queen that evening, after Rozie had mentioned the coincidence. “Chief Inspector Strong checked with the local CID team in Shepherd’s Bush, where Dr. Stiles died. She had a bit of an alcohol problem.”

“Goodness. Did she?”

“The City takes its toll, I suppose. She took a lot of pills, then the cocaine on top. Almost certainly accidental. Tragic, of course.”

He meant it. Sir Simon and his wife did not have children, but his niece was twenty-seven. She, too, had worked in the City, before setting up a company that seemed to mean she worked day and night from her laptop at home. She was a beautiful young woman, an only child with a shining future ahead of her. Sir Simon knew his brother and sister-in-law would never recover if anything happened to her.

“What was this young woman doing at the castle, precisely?” the Queen wondered. “Remind me.”

“She was a guest of the governor,” Sir Simon said. “He was hosting a little meeting about foreign intelligence for the Foreign Office.”

“Ah, yes. The young man from Djibouti.”

“Ma’am?”

“I remember the governor was very impressed with a man who had flown in from East Africa. Though I had rather thought his meeting was more about China. I must ask him about it sometime.”

“Yes, ma’am. That would make sense, actually. Dr. Stiles was an expert on the Chinese economy.”

“Oh?”

“She had a PhD in Chinese infrastructure funding. Golden Futures has several investments in Asian markets. She was a rising star.”

“You’re very well-informed, Simon.”

“I try to be, ma’am. There is another thing.”

“Yes?”

“You asked the commissioner about Mr. Brodsky’s family—whether anyone has come to collect the body. Well, they checked with the embassy and, no, nobody has as yet. They think—the embassy does—that his mother is in a mental institution. He had a half brother, who seems to have died on exercise in the army. Their army, not ours. We know about the father. You may recall he died when Brodsky was a child. That seems to be it. I imagine the Russians will repatriate the body eventually.”

“Thank you, Simon.”

She was looking grim again, he thought. Well, she was a mother of sons. These conversations were never easy.

“Cheer up, Lilibet,” Philip insisted. “Nobody’s died. Oh.”

They were in the car on the way to a private dinner with a trainer they had known since William was a baby. His horses had beaten hers twice last year, but she didn’t hold it against him. It would simply be a pleasure to talk nothing but racing for a whole, enchanting evening. And his eldest son ran a large estate up in Northumbria, so Philip could talk livestock yields and advances in organic farming and the vagaries of the shooting season.

She had been looking forward to it all day, and was resplendent in silver lace and a new pink lipstick, of which she had high hopes. Philip, of course, was like something out of a magazine, even at ninety-four. She had never known a man to look as good in uniform or in black tie. He had been the most eligible man in Europe when they’d married. She felt lucky then, and lucky now—even though he was, of course, utterly maddening half the time.

“Nobody has come to collect the body,” she said, to explain her expression.

“Well, no doubt somebody will.”

“I really don’t think so.”

“That’s hardly your problem, though, is it?”

She sighed. “It feels as if it is.”

“Come on, Lilibet. You’re not responsible for the whole world, you know. You had one dance with the man. That hardly constitutes a date.”

“Philip. Really.”

She looked out of the window at the cars overtaking the Bentley, which resolutely stuck at sixty-nine miles an hour and was so smooth it hardly seemed to be moving at all. This car was a treat. They saved the Bentley for special occasions, so it still smelled of fresh leather, rather than old dog and the cleaning fluid they used to disguise the smell of dog—with limited success. It was disconcertingly quiet, though, like speeding along in one of those padded listening booths they used to have in record shops.

“Come on, spit it out. What is it?”

She wasn’t sure what it was that bothered her, until she turned back to Philip and saw the gleam of light on his white-blond hair, the curve of his jaw, the confident way he sat, even relaxing in the car, as if poised for action.

“He reminded me of you,” she said, before she could stop herself.

“What, the Russian? Did he?”

“When you were younger.”

“Pah! Thank you very much!”

Philip was one of the best-looking men she had ever encountered, but not the most sensitive. He knew her inside out, and one of the things she loved most about him was that he didn’t kowtow to her as most people did. He saw her as “Lilibet,” much as she saw herself. He was straightforward, but hardly tender. So, he was not the best person to explain her feelings about the young Russian to, even though he was responsible for them.

Without her realizing it, Maksim Brodsky had taken her back to the days in Valletta, when she had danced the night away with the other navy wives and rejoiced in her freedom with her glamorous man, safe in the knowledge that her father was king and would be a wise monarch and personal guide for years to come. He was dead a year later. Those months in Malta were preserved in amber.

Now she knew why the image of the young man in that wardrobe was so hard to take. Knowing didn’t make it easier, exactly, but at least she understood.

“Feeling better?” Philip asked, without really looking.

“Yes, thank you,” she said.

He reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze. The car whisked them on through the Berkshire night.

Sir Peter Venn, asked to drinks before lunch at Windsor on Saturday morning, accepted without question. He and his wife had been planning to see an exhibition at the National Gallery with some old friends from his posting in Rome, but he put them off without a murmur. If the Queen wants you to go to drinks, you go.

There was no obvious indication of why he’d been invited, and with a courtier’s discretion, he didn’t ask. As governor of the castle he was very familiar with the room—in this case, the Octagon Room in the Brunswick Tower, overlooking the park. He mingled with Lady Caroline Cadwallader, the canon chaplain of St. George’s Chapel down the hill, and the few other senior members of the Household scattered about. Her Majesty was in upbeat form, looking forward to the Royal Windsor Horse Show in a month’s time, which was always one of her favorite events. She chatted about her hopes for Barbers Shop, which she had entered in the Ridden Show Horse category. Unlike others in the small group that had clustered round, Sir Peter was not a horseman and was not entirely sure what a Ridden Show Horse was (surely all show horses were ridden?), but it was obviously something important if the Queen was excited about the chance of winning.

“I know you’ve been busy recently, Governor,” she said, turning her bright blue gaze on him, and he wondered if he had looked unsuitably bored just now.

“Have I?”

“That meeting you hosted. You introduced me to a painfully shy young man from Djibouti.”

She did a rather brilliant imitation of a young man avoiding eye contact and staring at his shoes. The rest of the group, having the finest-honed diplomatic skills in the country, saw that they were not needed for this conversation and melted away. Sir Peter, who had been somewhat disappointed by Kelvin Lo’s failure to shine that day, was pleased to have the opportunity to talk about him a little bit more.

“You remembered, ma’am! Yes, Kelvin’s rather a genius. He started working for us a few months ago. He’s already unearthed untold amounts of information about the Belt and Road.”

“The Belt and Road?”

“Yes. That was the real focus of the meeting. China’s grand plan to connect Asia, Africa, and Europe. Awfully confusing, really, because ‘belt’ is for the land bits, which are often roads, and ‘road’ is for the sea bits, which never are. Except metaphorically. The Chinese are very metaphorical, I find.”

“Oh.” It rang a bell. “Is that the same as the New Silk Road? We talked about it when President Xi came last year.”

“Well, that might be a romantic name for it, ma’am, but it’s anything but. I’m not an expert myself, but I was glad to be able to host the meeting here at the castle. It was a classified thing the Foreign Office organized, with help from MI6. Having it here gave everyone the privacy they needed, and it was useful for Kelvin, being so close to Heathrow. He was able to fly in and out quickly on his way to a conference in Virginia, although of course his plane here was delayed by bad weather so he was rather late for everything. We put off the main part of our meeting by a day to include him, because he has such an intriguing insight into what the Chinese are doing in Africa. I’m sorry—is this more detail than you were hoping for, ma’am?”

“No, it’s fascinating. Do go on.”

“He’s created a computer program to map their infrastructure investments across the continent and to neighboring countries, and they really are much more massive than anyone had anticipated—or than the Chinese are owning up to.”

“Are they?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am. They’re building whole ports, and railways and superhighways, and even courts to settle trading disputes.”

“So different from the last century, when they would hardly talk to anyone.”

“Indeed, ma’am. President Xi’s making up for lost time. But there are big questions about how much debt the host nations are getting into, and whether the infrastructure can be used for military purposes. I mean, goodness, don’t let me bore you with it all now. You’ll see it in the report MI6 are putting together. And the other one the Foreign Office people are finalizing, with some of our more strategic concerns. That’s the one this meeting was to discuss, of course.”

“And who was at it, exactly? They all seemed so young.”

“They were, ma’am. It’s rather frightening, isn’t it? When people your grandchildren’s age suddenly seem to be running the country. We had various boffins from the City and academia and GCHQ. Hardly anyone over thirty-five, I’d say. Kelvin is twenty-six, would you believe?”

She noticed that behind Sir Peter’s shoulder, Lady Caroline was trying to catch her eye. The drinks were overrunning and the chef was probably worrying about the fish.

“Yes, well . . . Isn’t that interesting?” she said, twisting her wedding ring so Lady Caroline could come in and break up the conversation. It was a shame, because it really was interesting, and she would have liked to have chatted more. She hadn’t realized Sir Peter’s meeting had been so secret and strategic. It gave her a lot to think about.

16

The rest of the weekend was very relaxing. Edward and Sophie came over with their children on Sunday after church, and they all went out for a hack. Back inside the castle they looked through the albums of Barbers Shop winning his races as a gelding, and subsequently triumphing at several Ridden Show Horse events. His trainer was bringing him over from Essex for the horse show. At fourteen, he probably only had another year of showing in him. Everyone would miss him. He had been such a star—on the track and in the ring. It was nice to see Louise asking intelligent questions about his bloodline and schooling.

Sir Simon appeared that evening with her schedule for the week, and for the first time in a month it looked busy: the Privy Council, the post office turning five hundred, herself turning ninety, and then, to round it off, the Obamas. Actually, that was the event she was most looking forward to. They had a glamour about them, that couple, reminiscent of the Kennedys and the Reagans. They were intelligent and warm, and had got on with all the family when they visited last time. That had been all the bells and whistles at Buckingham Palace. This would be something quieter and more intimate. She wanted Windsor to be at its best: ideally without the unsolved murder of a foreign national and her own Security Service’s hunt for traitors in her Household hanging over it.

She went to bed early, but couldn’t sleep. Thoughts of the Belt and Road meeting kept bubbling up to bother her. It fitted with something. Something that had happened that evening, when she had gone over to the Norman Tower, where the governor was treating his guests to a drinks reception of their own in his private drawing room, and she had agreed to pop in and say hello.

She hadn’t stayed long. There were about eight of them in the drawing room, she recalled, most of them ridiculously young, and Sir Peter had made the introductions. They were an unusually incohesive group. She had put it partly down to nerves, but they really didn’t seem to know each other on the whole. It was as if they had been plucked from their various organizations and institutions for this particular event, and were still on awkward social terms. So different from the military cocktail parties she had so often attended, where the officers were a tight little band, keen to josh each other and make jokes.

They had dressed for the occasion. Not evening gowns, of course, but black tie and cocktail dresses. All but two were men, including the senior official from the Foreign Office who had arranged the meeting and a couple of spooks from MI6. All the others were analysts and academics, she supposed. One of the girls had been very pretty, with elfin looks and a cropped, blond shingle that reminded one of Twiggy. The other was dark, with curtains of straight hair that half obscured her face. This was Rachel Stiles—the young woman who would soon be dead of an overdose. Had someone in that room caused her to take it? All must have stayed the night, if the main meeting had been postponed to the following day.

China and Russia.

Could there be some connection? Geopolitically—as Sir Simon would say—of course there could. Was Maksim Brodsky some sort of Russian spy? Had he been planted by Peyrovski to get hold of Chinese secrets? Had Rachel Stiles been helping him? Is that why they both had to die?

Oh, for goodness’ sake, she was getting as bad as the director general. The very idea was absurd. And yet her mind kept going back to that little gathering in the Norman Tower. Something was wrong. She’d noticed it at the time, and then dismissed it, but now she knew she should have trusted her instincts. If only she could remember what it was.

She tried to picture the men. One had been unusually tall, she remembered. One had an Indian-sounding name. One had talked exceedingly fast about something to do with debt ratio formulas and then stood waiting for her to say something intelligent. She had smiled and said, “How very interesting.” What else was one supposed to do?

Meanwhile, if she was going to find the killer by the president’s visit on Friday, she would have to work very fast indeed.

On Monday morning Rozie showed up for work wearing borrowed jodhpurs and an old tweed jacket over a long-sleeved T-shirt. This was not how an assistant private secretary usually dressed, but she had been told to meet the Boss at the back entrance of the Royal Mews, ready for a ride.

The Queen was already there, in a quilted jacket and with a signature silk scarf knotted into position. Rozie couldn’t remember ever having seen her in a hard hat. Queens did not fall off horses, it seemed. And to be fair, the glossy black Fell pony looked the most placid of creatures, waiting patiently with her groom in the immaculate yard, next to a mahogany bay with short, powerful legs and a black silky mane that he tossed flirtatiously in Rozie’s direction.

“Ah. Hello!” The Boss greeted her with a grin, indicating the bay. “We thought we’d get Temple tacked up for you. He’s about the right size and a nice character, as long as you tell him who’s in charge.”

Rozie curtsied, which felt odd in riding boots. “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

The Queen was in good spirits, but sharp. “One reads one’s papers. I gather you learned to ride in Hyde Park. So did I. Come on.”

They mounted their rides and two grooms accompanied them, one on a black pony almost identical to the Queen’s, and one on a sturdy Windsor Grey. The day was gloomy, with scudding clouds and a distant hint of rain. The Queen glanced up at the sky.

“I checked the weather on the BBC. We’ve got an hour or so, apparently.”

They headed east, over grass and under trees, towards the wide spaces of Home Park, where Temple settled into a steady walk and Rozie flexed her riding muscles, relaxing into the rhythm and realizing how much she needed this.

“You grew up not far from where I did,” the Queen observed, meaning her parents’ house in Mayfair.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m very impressed that you rode in central London. It can’t have been easy, getting lessons?”

She was too polite to say exactly what she meant, Rozie thought, but she was right: it had been bloody difficult. Girls who grow up on council estates aren’t supposed to ride horses. Yes, it was near Hyde Park, but it’s one life if you live in one of the big houses in Holland Park or Mayfair, and quite another if you live in a two-bed flat in Notting Hill and your dad works on the London Underground, putting up with passenger aggro every day, while your mum works as a midwife and a volunteer in the local community to replace the services that somehow kept disappearing. Time and money for horses weren’t exactly a priority.

But maybe they had one thing in common apart from Hyde Park, which was being elder daughters, whose parents had high expectations of them.

“I found a way, ma’am.”

“Oh? How?”

“I worked at the stables.”

Night and day, first thing in the morning, weekends—whenever they would let her, to pay for rides. Rozie often did an hour before school and another couple of hours in the evening, fitting in homework somehow, never quite making top of the class but keeping her head well above water academically, which was the deal with Mum: “If you can’t get good grades, say goodbye to the ponies.” “Horses, Mum.” “Whatever.”

“And you rode competitively?”

“Yes, ma’am. For the army.”

Rozie did everything competitively. After combining school and the stables, uni seemed like a breeze and she had joined the Officer Training Corps and still got a First. She wasn’t the world’s best rider, never would be, but she was utterly fearless going round an eventing course. Give her a decent horse and a bit of practice, and she would fly, swim, whatever it took.

She was a good shot, too, with a top 100 badge from the army shooting competition at Bisley Camp. Rozie always felt out of place in those worlds, but beat the boys at it anyway. There was nothing in life as satisfying as beating a posh boy at something he was good at. Early on, she had also learned to look like she didn’t care, which made it better. And now here she was, with a good degree, a tour in Afghanistan, and a fast-track job in a posh boys’ bank, working for the Queen.

Normally, she put all of this behind her and just got on with the day, but the horse underneath her took her back to those Hyde Park early mornings. How could she ever possibly have imagined she would end up here?

“What do you think of Temple?” the Queen asked.

“He’s not happy.” Rozie laughed. “I can sense he wants to get going.”

“Don’t let him.”

“He’s very taken with himself, isn’t he?”

The Queen grinned across at her. “And quite right, too. With looks like that. Yes, Temple, you’re gorgeous and you know it.”

They ambled along one of the walks, listening to birdsong between the full-throttle roar of the jets overhead. Rozie had never seen the Queen so deeply in her element. She felt as if she had somehow crossed a threshold, and now she, the girl from the council estate, was one of them: a fellow rider, a member of the inner circle. Was this ride a reward for the work she’d done in London? The Queen would never say, and Rozie would never ask, but it felt that way.

They talked about Rozie’s recent trip to Lagos, and how big the city had grown now, to contain twenty million people. This was not news to the Queen, who was familiar with the capital cities of all the Commonwealth countries. It had been a big surprise to Rozie, though, the first time she visited. She realized how prejudiced she had been about Nigeria, assuming it was some kind of would-be England in the sun. If anything, it was the opposite—heading in its own direction with confidence that put this little island in the shade.

“And was it your grandparents who first came to live in London?”

It was. Rozie talked with pride about her father’s parents, who had arrived in the sixties. Her grandfather had started out washing bodies in the morgue. It was the only job they would let him have, but he had always worked hard for his community. Everyone in Peckham knew Samuel Oshodi. If there was anything you needed, he worked out how to get it and made it happen somehow.

“He got an MBE,” Rozie added. “I was tiny when he received it, but I remember him going to the palace and we all met up afterwards to celebrate. He met you that day and—” She stopped, still smiling at the memory. He had said Her Majesty was “very small, but quite dazzling; even her skin seemed to glitter.” It was family folklore now. It was meant to be flattering, but Rozie wasn’t sure how the woman herself would take it.

The woman herself was giving Rozie the strangest look. Had she accidentally said the words out loud? She was sure she hadn’t. The Queen was staring at her as if she had asked a difficult question. Or as if somebody else had, and Rozie wasn’t even there . . .

She had it now, the memory that had been so elusive.

It had come back with Technicolor clarity while Rozie was talking—so strong, in fact, she was amazed she had forgotten it at all.

“Let’s go back,” she decided, cutting short the ride. “The sky looks threatening.”

The Queen was right. Steel-grey clouds had given way to huge columns, the color of Tahitian pearls. The temperature had dropped by a degree. Not for the first time, the BBC weather report had been unduly optimistic. They turned for home and set the horses and ponies to a trot.

All the way she pictured the seraphic look on Rozie’s face when she had talked about her grandfather’s MBE. That’s how it was with medals. She should have thought of it at the investiture last Wednesday, but that had been routine, though pleasant. It took Rozie’s memory of childish excitement to bring her own, half-buried memory back to life.

Awards were a special thing, personal and enduring. The odd person turned them down, but anyone who accepted treasured theirs with fierce pride. They remembered the day they got it, and everything they had done to earn it, and so did their families. She had had countless conversations with proud wives and widows, husbands and sons, about decorations won in war and in the community. People could be shy on first meeting, but never when it came to medals. One question, and they opened up. Sometimes they were overcome with emotion, if friends and fellow soldiers had died during a brave campaign, or if they were wearing it on behalf of a relative who had died. But they were never neutral, ever.

Rachel Stiles had been wearing a fitted dinner jacket over her cocktail dress. On the lapel was a miniature silver cross, backed by a laurel wreath. She was not the only person in the room to be wearing a decoration. Sir Peter had seven, after an illustrious career, and two of the other men in the room had one each. Dr. Stiles’s particularly interested the Queen, though, because it was the Elizabeth Cross, awarded to the next of kin of members of the armed forces killed in action or in a terrorist attack. She had instituted it herself, to recognize their sacrifice, less than ten years ago.

“And who was this for?” she remembered asking.

The girl had looked startled. “My father.”

The words had seemed forced, and came out almost as a question. Nevertheless, one persisted. “Where was he?”

Now the girl looked confused. “Er, Buckingham Palace?”

She had been trembling, the Queen noticed, eaten up with nerves. The Queen had decided not to pursue it, and she had blamed herself a little for being vague with her question. She didn’t mean “Where did he get the medal?” of course, because he must have been dead in order for it to be awarded to his family. But that was obvious, surely? She meant “Which attack had he been in? Or which campaign?”

This was a sensitive subject, naturally, but she had learned over the years that families were keen to share their loss. Perhaps it was because one was in some way representative of what they had died for. Perhaps it was because she cared very much, and had met many other families in similar situations, and indeed lost very dear loved ones to war and terrorists herself.

She had been expecting, in brief, the undoubtedly tragic story behind the medal—not a two-word answer for where it had been given to someone else. Although Buckingham Palace was an unusual answer in this case. The Elizabeth Cross was normally presented by lord-lieutenants in ceremonies around the country. She had personally given only a handful of them to relatives, and rarely at the palace. But perhaps this was why it had stood out.

It was a complicated situation, she had told herself at the time, in the brief flash during which she had considered it. The girl was emotional, and shy. That explained the strange answer. Clearly, she was not a great conversationalist. It was this girl she had been briefly reminded of by Kelvin Lo’s insistence on staring at his shoes the following day. She who had looked unwell, standing in the group behind him.

Soon after their brief exchange that first evening, the Queen had gone from the Norman Tower to the State Apartments, and then she was focused on the evening à la russe with Charles. She had thought no more about it.

But Rachel Stiles had not been emotional. Her confusion was just that. Her answer had been plain wrong—about an event that should have been seared into her very essence. She was not the owner of that medal. She did not know what it meant. She was wearing somebody else’s jacket.

Was she even Rachel Stiles at all?

As if on cue, there was a sudden clap of thunder in the skies above the park and the first heavy raindrops began to fall. Emma, the Fell pony, shook her head slightly and carried on at a steady trot, but Temple glanced up as if at a gunshot and rocketed forward without warning, taking Rozie with him.

“Go after them!” the Queen instructed the groom on the Grey. Temple was heading for the trees at a canter. Rozie might get knocked off by a branch if she wasn’t careful.

The rain was bucketing down now. Cursing the BBC forecast, the Queen followed as fast as she dared.

17

An hour later, they were back at work in the private sitting room. Rozie was aware of sore thighs after such a long time since her last hack, but it was worth it for the exhilaration of the ride. She still felt a glow, thinking about it, and especially that last bit, racing across Home Park at hyper-speed, until Temple finally agreed to submit to her commands and trot for home like a show horse at Olympia. She was very fond of him already. He was a rascal, but she had the measure of him. The Queen had told her she could ride him whenever she was free. Rozie stood in a bubble of happiness.

The Queen, in cashmere and pearls, and looking as if she had spent half a day in a salon, nursed a cup of black tea with honey. The squall had passed quickly, but had drenched them all anyway. She had gone upstairs immediately to spruce up and put her head under the hair dryer. The last thing one needed was a head cold this week.

She brought Rozie up to speed on the incident with the Elizabeth Cross.

“So, you think she stole the jacket?” Rozie asked.

“Possibly.” Or the very identity, the Queen wanted to add. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to say the words out loud. “Can you check, please, whether the Stiles family were awarded the medal? And can I see a picture of her?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Oh, and, Rozie?”

“Ma’am?”

“There is a gentleman called Billy MacLachlan who lives in Richmond. He was in my protection team a long time ago. You’ll find his contact details in the files. Could you ask him, very privately, to double-check with the pathologist that there was nothing unusual about Dr. Stiles’s death? I think he still has good links with the police. You might get him to suggest he has a source who thinks it might not have been a simple overdose.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And I needn’t say . . .”

“No, ma’am, of course. Now, about Thursday. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall will be arriving from Highgrove at about midday. . . .”

The afternoon was scheduled for a haircut and a long session with Angela, the Queen’s dresser. There were several outfit changes to finalize for the coming days, and the weather remained resolutely unpredictable. There was also jewelry to choose, laid out for inspection in a series of open, velvet-lined boxes. It was always good to spend time with someone who, in other circumstances, she would have called a close friend, but today she had a lot on her mind. The Queen tried to concentrate, but it was more difficult than usual. It took tremendous patience to wait for Rozie’s evening appearance with the next day’s schedule and an update on the morning’s activities.

The news was mixed.

“Dr. Stiles’s father, Captain James Stiles of the Royal Engineers, was killed by an IED in Kosovo in 1999,” Rozie reported. “Rachel was ten. The Elizabeth Cross was presented to her mother, who subsequently died of ovarian cancer, by the Lord-Lieutenant of Essex at Merville Barracks in Colchester in 2010. Rachel had a younger brother, but she seems to have taken on the right to wear the award.”

“I see.”

“I have a picture of Rachel here, ma’am.”

Rozie submitted a printout of the form submitted to the castle security team for vetting, with a passport photograph attached at the top. The image was small and unremarkable, showing a young woman with blue eyes and familiar curtains of thick, dark hair.

“I looked for others, but they’re quite hard to get hold of,” Rozie admitted. “For a millennial, she kept herself out of social media. There wasn’t a photo on LinkedIn—that’s the website for professionals, ma’am—and she wasn’t on Facebook or dating sites or anything like that.” There had been a few group pictures of office parties at Golden Futures, but nothing particularly useful. The news feeds had gone with a fuzzy graduation picture when they had announced her death.

The Queen examined the photograph with a magnifying glass from her desk drawer. From a distance, without the glass, one would have said it was her. But she saw now that was largely because of the hair. The nose on this girl was different to the one she dimly remembered. This one was larger and less attractive. The chin was longer. Or was it? If someone had asked her to swear, right now, that this was a different person (luckily nobody ever did that sort of thing), she couldn’t have done it. She felt it was, but that was all.

However, Merville Barracks was most definitely not Buckingham Palace. That conversation about the medal ceremony made no sense. It was ironic that the Elizabeth Cross was one of the few decorations unlikely to have been presented at the palace. Not many people would instantly think of that, of course—but she happened to be one of the few who did.

Would that convince anyone else? Rachel had not even been the person receiving the award: that had been her mother. So easy to say a girl might not remember, or that she had been confused in the heat of the moment meeting the Queen.

But one knew. One knew. One just did, and that was the end of it.

Rozie sensed some of what she was thinking, and looked uncertain. “Wouldn’t the security checks have found her out if she wasn’t the right person?”

“That is their job,” the Queen mused.

“And what about afterwards—after the murder, I mean, when the police interviewed everyone who’d been here? Wouldn’t they have noticed?”

“You would think so.” She sighed and changed the subject. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard back from Billy MacLachlan?” she asked without much hope. Rozie had presumably only contacted him a few hours ago, at most. He could hardly have discovered anything by now.

“No, ma’am. But he said he’ll let us know as soon as he hears anything useful.”

“Good.” The young woman hovered. She looked nervous, the Queen realized, and hesitant: not normal demeanor for her APS. “Was there anything else?”

“Actually there was, ma’am. I think I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’m sorry.”

“Spit it out.”

The Queen watched as Rozie screwed up her courage and lifted her chin.

“I rang Rachel’s office and asked about her next of kin. I thought you might want me to talk to them later. Anyway, I said I was calling from the housekeeper’s office here, and she had left something behind and now we realized it was hers we wanted to return it. And the woman at the office said she had no idea Rachel had been to Windsor Castle. I’d forgotten the meeting was so highly secret, ma’am—or rather, I assumed her office knew, at least. But anyway, they didn’t, or not the desk manager I ended up talking to.”

“Oh, dear. You didn’t mention the nature of the meeting, I assume?” The Queen’s voice was even. This was unfortunate, but not a disaster.

“No, ma’am, of course not. But she said, this woman, that she was surprised Rachel had come at all. She’d been sick for several days and they hadn’t seen her. I asked for how long, and the woman said for a week before she died, which would take it back to about the time of the dine and sleep.”

“Thank you, Rozie.” The Queen was thoughtful.

“Do you want me to tell anyone, ma’am?”

“You might find out from Chief Inspector Strong, in passing, whether his team managed to interview everyone on that list of visitors after Mr. Brodsky died. That was my impression, certainly. And tell the superintendent I’m concerned about security and I’d like him to look into the procedures that day and the following one—whether everyone’s clearance was double-checked. I imagine he’s done so already. He can tell me what he found.”

The Queen was not superstitious, but she had often noticed that bad news seemed to come in threes. The following day, after what seemed like a promising report, three setbacks arrived within an hour.

She was just preparing for another Privy Council meeting when Rozie popped in.

“I’ve heard back from Billy MacLachlan, Your Majesty.”

“Oh good. Anything interesting?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. There was a slightly strange toxicology report on the body of Rachel Stiles. As well as the cocaine and alcohol, there were traces of a tranquilizer she hadn’t been prescribed. But they said she’d been struggling with anxiety for a long time. She lost both her parents young, as we know.”

“I see.”

However, Rozie’s next report put paid to the Queen’s emerging theory. DCI Strong’s team had indeed interviewed everyone they wanted to in the days after the murder—including Rachel Stiles, who had been at home in her Docklands flat and happy to be interviewed by two of his detectives, despite recovering from flu. So she had been aware of events, at least.

On top of that, the castle superintendent had got the head of security to double-check the procedures, and everything had been done properly. If Stiles had got someone to impersonate her, they had done it very well.

However, the third blow was by far the worst.

Humphreys reported, with some glee, she felt, the discovery by the team in the Round Tower that Sandy Robertson had purchased a pair of lacy knickers online last year that were identical to the ones found near Brodsky’s body. They were closing in.

The deadline she had set herself was approaching, and she wondered if she had made any progress at all. She was certain she was onto something, but Strong and his team had unwittingly suggested otherwise. For now, however, it was important to focus on the days ahead, which would be busy enough to keep her fully occupied. History would be made, and the world would be watching. Poor Sandy Robertson would have to wait.

She couldn’t bear it, but there was nothing she could do.

18

As a little girl, when asked who she would like to be when she grew up, Princess Elizabeth had said, “A lady in the country, with animals.” For the past few weeks she had been just that, but for the next few days it was time to be Queen.

Her birthday was still a day away, but on Wednesday she and Prince Philip celebrated the five-hundredth anniversary of the Royal Mail by visiting the Delivery Office in Windsor. There were crowds and cheers and bunting, and the weather was kind. Angela had done a very good job with a pink coat and hat, which would photograph well in the sunshine. The Delivery Office was to be renamed in one’s honor, and there was an exhibition to review, and the inevitable commemorative stamp.

It was all very jolly, and only exceeded in its essential Britishness by what followed straight afterwards, which was a trip to nearby Alexandra Gardens, where there was a new bandstand to open and crowds of schoolchildren who sang, while others performed an extract from Romeo and Juliet as part of the Shakespeare Schools Festival.

Back at the castle, somewhat exhausted, she and Philip both had a nap before hosting a private dinner for the family members who had already started arriving for tomorrow. The Private Apartments were filling up with children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. She hadn’t seen most of them since they had posed for family portraits after Easter, shortly before the dine and sleep.

These pictures, taken by Annie Leibovitz, would be released to the public soon. She was quite happy with them, though she preferred her private snaps, really. She liked people caught off guard, being silly and having fun, and that was hardly the Leibovitz style. But the image of her and Anne had a certain something. Another with the dogs on the castle steps was rather nice. And the public would adore the one with little Louise and James, the great-grandchildren, and the handbag. Yes, all in all, although the American had arrived with her usual retinue and outrageous amounts of equipment, and taken four times as long as one really wanted to spend, it had been a success. She would show the results to the children tonight.

Rozie watched the family from a distance, with the Queen at the heart of it, her face alight with pleasure. She really did dazzle, just like Baba Samuel said. It was something about her skin, which was flawless, and also her eyes, which danced with delight whenever there was something to amuse her. The ready presence of pearls and diamonds did no harm, obviously—but Baba Samuel was right: even in her dressing gown she seemed to glitter. Now, in a silk damask evening gown and antique sparkles, she looked radiant.

So Rozie decided that she wouldn’t spoil the moment, today or tomorrow, by mentioning Vadim Borovik, Yuri Peyrovski’s valet, who had been discovered, badly beaten, in an alleyway in Soho. Masha Peyrovskaya had called Rozie this afternoon in a paroxysm of panic and despair.

“Yuri know he helped me! He order it! He punish him and it is me soon!”

It had taken some time and all Rozie’s skill to calm her down a little. Masha refused to believe the police “story” that it was a typical homophobic attack. “Of course they say that! Because he is gay, everything is possible!”

“Will he be all right?” Rozie had asked.

“Who knows? Perhaps he die in the night.”

Russians really were very melodramatic, Rozie thought. But she decided to check on the valet’s health tomorrow, to be on the safe side. If she could find a spare moment.

Tomorrow should have been her day off, but the birthday meant all free time was canceled. Various royals were arriving from around Europe to attend the Queen’s birthday party at the castle. And meanwhile the president of the United States would be arriving at Stansted Airport, before meeting the Queen the following day. She and Sir Simon would be on their feet from dawn to dusk, liaising, troubleshooting, and overseeing. The whole world would be looking in, to check that everything was done to the highest standard known to man, every second of the day. Queen Victoria had lived to be eighty-one. Ninety was new territory for the monarchy. It was important for the Queen to start the next decade as she meant to go on.

The next day, there was still no news from the Round Tower. But it was the twenty-first of April, and it seemed as if the whole of Windsor was out on the streets. They crowded against the barriers and stood on balconies and at windows, waving a sea of Union flags. The bells from the chapel rang, and there were bugles and the band of the Coldstream Guards.

The Queen put her thoughts about the investigation to one side and focused on the job, which was to be herself in public, and which it took a lifetime to learn. During the walkabout below the castle, it seemed as if everyone had a bouquet to give. There were giant pink balloons, and fellow nonagenarians to meet, an official walk to open (she was very good with velvet curtains and little cords), and a giant purple cake made by the lady who won the baking show on the BBC, featuring an unusual array of flavors, which she did not get the opportunity to try.

Last year the people at Land Rover had created a sort of popemobile out of an open-top Range Rover, and she stood in the back of it with Philip at her side, waving to all the flag-flapping well-wishers. The sun had consented to shine again, appearing decorously through silver clouds. It was chilly, but not unduly cold. She was warmed, anyway, by the cheerful mood of the people, who burst into snatches of “Happy Birthday” along the route.

She thought of her namesake, and her royal progresses round the country. What would the first Queen Elizabeth have made of the queen-mobile, as Philip inevitably called it? She would have been pleased with the crowds, no doubt. One tried not to think of the snipers on rooftops, keeping an eye out for trouble, and to be grateful one could still do this. These days, it was usually all bulletproof glass and safety vehicles. But that was for the prime minister. If the monarch could not be seen, what was the point of her? Hence today’s outfit in spring-grass green, in honor of the season, and gratitude for clement weather, and the iron constitution that meant she could still stand up in an open car.

Later, the setting sun tinged the silver sky with oyster pink. Charles made a short and heartfelt speech and invited her to light a beacon. It would be the first of over a thousand around the UK and as far as Gibraltar, starting with a rather splendid chain of flaming torches down the Long Walk, burning bright against the darkening sky. It reminded her very much of the celebrations after the war, and the way the kingdom had spread news since the Armada. Meanwhile, Sir Simon informed her that over a quarter of a million people had sent birthday wishes via Twitter. Thank God they hadn’t sent cards.

She had asked for as little fuss as possible today, and this was as little fuss as it was possible for the country to make. It had been tiring but joyful. So very special to spend the day at Windsor. She felt as if she had shared it with the whole town, and they with her. Now it was time for dinner at the castle—done Charles-style, which meant a table for seventy in the Waterloo Chamber, an abundance of flowers, and lots of funny speeches. And, one hoped, everybody still alive by morning.

If Putin had wanted to send a message, she thought, he should have chosen tonight.

She went upstairs to change. On her pillow was a packet of handmade Scottish fudge from Philip, with a note. He hadn’t forgotten. She ate a piece, to keep her going for the night ahead.

19

Friday morning dawned clear and grey, after a night of rain. President Obama was in London and due to visit Mr. Cameron in Downing Street, which took the news away from Windsor for a few hours—for which she was grateful.

He and the first lady were due for lunch, and although—thankfully—no one had come to inform her that another visitor had been murdered, the first was still very much under investigation. As the hours ticked by, she had hoped for a nod from Sir Simon, or a request for a meeting from Gavin Humphreys, to tell her about a stunning breakthrough, but there had been nothing.

Later that morning, Sir Simon did arrive with news of a sort, but it only muddied the waters further. Given the similarity in hair type, and the unexpected subsequent death, the police had tested DNA from the hair found on Brodsky’s body with that of Rachel Stiles and found it to be a match.

So the girl had been here. And yet she couldn’t explain her own father’s medal.

“You look surprised, ma’am.”

“Not really,” she said, regaining her composure. “Did they know each other?”

“Not as far as anyone knows. But she did say she had a brief conversation with him in the corridor the night before he died. One of the housekeepers confirms it. Maybe that’s how the hair got transferred. DCI Strong is liaising with the divisional CID in the Isle of Dogs, where the body was found. They’re going to get someone to look into whether they knew each other before. But it doesn’t seem likely, and if she did, it doesn’t explain much. She didn’t know she’d be sleeping over until late afternoon, so she could hardly have planned to kill anyone.”

“I see. Thank you for letting me know.”

“Ma’am.”

And there it was. The president was about to climb into Marine One to fly down to Windsor, and the whole investigation into Brodsky’s death had just taken two steps backwards. Not MI5’s investigation, obviously: that still continued down the straight, firmly blinkered. But one’s own theory, which was only half formed anyway, and was now back at the starting gate.

So be it. One would simply have to, as Harry reliably informed her was the current lingo, “style it out.”

After much to-ing and fro-ing between offices, it had been decided to meet the president and Mrs. Obama in person as they landed at Home Park, just below the East Terrace. It wasn’t normal procedure, but then, one didn’t normally get to celebrate one’s birthday with the president and first lady at one’s favorite castle. She would pick them up in a Range Rover. Philip would drive.

There were three helicopters in all, and it was a relief when they managed to navigate their way through Heathrow airspace to land safely on the golf course. The day was breezy, and the Queen protected her hair with a headscarf, while Philip stayed warm in a mac. Emerging from Marine One, with his protection team in place, the president was all smiles.

There was a bit of a question mark about who was going to sit where in the car, but that was soon sorted. The staff seemed to have assumed it would be like a state dinner, where the visiting gentleman accompanies the lady host—but it felt to the Queen more like a shoot, where obviously the men would like to go in front together so they could chat. She sat in the back with Michelle, who was as charming as always once her nerves began to settle.

The first lady was unusually tall. The Queen got a bit of a crick in her neck looking up at her. However, she still radiated that star presence one was rather fond of. It was nice not to be the only woman the press wanted pictures of. Mrs. Obama’s every public move was commented on and dissected, and she was used to being both adored and vilified, and never entirely alone. They had quite a lot in common—although of course one had been on the throne for nearly a decade before Michelle Obama’s husband was even born.

The castle was crawling with security by now, and TV cameras and crew. There was a quick press call in the Oak Room to keep everyone happy, and then at last they could relax. There was a lot to talk about, what with the upcoming referendum and the elections, and the couple’s plans for life after the White House. She would miss them. But the idea of a female president of the United States was an interesting one. How the world had changed since 1926. Who could possibly have foreseen such an eventuality back then?

It wasn’t until after the lunch, walking back towards the cars to say goodbye, that the president leaned down to her and said, “I understand you’ve been having a little local difficulty. With a young Russian. If there’s anything we can do to help—”

The Queen turned to him gravely, before flashing a quick, dismissive smile.

“Thank you. The Security Service seems to have it under control. They seem to think the butler did it.”

“That would be in keeping.”

“I hope he didn’t. I’m rather fond of my butlers.”

President Obama thought of his auntie’s house in Hawaii, his student digs in New York, and now the diligent team in the White House who catered to his every whim, and nodded sagely, but with a wicked glint in his eye.

“Aren’t we all, ma’am? Aren’t we all?”

20

Rozie sat in her bedroom with the light on, willing herself to go to bed after the most exhausting day she could remember, but she was still too wired to sleep. It was two in the morning. Almost all the windows in the castle were dark. She wanted to FaceTime Fliss in Frankfurt, but her sister would be asleep like everyone around here—and also like everyone around here, she would be getting up early in the morning.

Less than five hours until the alarm. Rozie knew she should have a quick shower and a warm drink and switch off that bit in her brain that kept going over the day in five-minute intervals, grading every decision and reaction according to how well it had gone. Instead, she went over to the decanter tray (as normal at Windsor as a kettle in Notting Hill) and poured herself a whiskey. She’d already eaten all the plantain chips she’d brought back from Lagos, so she also helped herself to some little jam sandwiches, cut to the size of old pennies, from a Tupperware pot. These were leftovers from the children’s teatime yesterday passed along by the kitchens. What would her grandfather say if he knew she had shared a joke with the Crown Prince of Denmark and was eating Prince George’s spare jam pennies?

Her laptop was still open and she checked tomorrow’s schedule before cycling through Twitter, the BBC, the FT, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Then, on her sixth jam penny, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, and the other rags that followed the Royal Family, to make sure they hadn’t misreported today’s events with any greater magnitude than normal. From her playlist she picked Art Blakey, hoping that some Blue Note jazz would compensate for her cortisol crash. She went down several rabbit holes on YouTube: “President Obama Arrives at Windsor Castle: LIVE,” “Hillary Clinton Addresses Her Losing Streak Cold Open: SNL,” “Top 9 Funniest Julia Louis-Dreyfus Old Navy Commercials.” (By now she was hating herself.)

On Facebook, she stalked her sister and various cousins, before randomly searching for people she knew. The clock on her screen told her it was nearly 3 a.m. If she didn’t turn off the laptop soon she would . . . She was too tired to think about what might happen tomorrow, but it would be bad. Whatever. She ate another jam penny and typed Meredith Gostelow’s name, but the architect did not appear as a Facebook member. How weird. Did the woman not have a life? Then she tried Masha Peyrovskaya, hoping for endless photographs of exotic holidays and high-powered ladies who lunched. But though there was a profile, it was private. Fair enough, Rozie thought. On a roll now, prompted by that day in London, she typed in “Vijay Kulandaiswamy”—not an easy name to forget.

This time, it was different.

There was only one entry that matched the search, and the profile photo matched the man she had met in Brodsky’s Covent Garden flat. Vijay was a sharer. His feed was full of updates for anyone to see. He liked GIFs and memes from the US elections, which made Rozie feel right at home, and pictures of himself and friends at bars and restaurants around the world. Rozie scrolled up and down, feeling welcome sleepiness finally descend, but when she got back to the top of the feed she was wide awake again.

The most recent photograph, which she had ignored at first, was an old one of Vijay with a group of disheveled friends, looking drunk and happy at the end of a party. “Miss you forever. RIP,” the caption began, and as she had Maksim Brodsky on her mind she assumed at first that it was prompted by his death.

But this farewell message wasn’t for Brodsky. It was for someone else—a girl. Rozie felt bad for Vijay. What an unfortunate coincidence to lose your roommate and a female friend within two weeks of each other. This girl was twenty-six, the caption said. Her name was Anita Moodie and it wasn’t clear how she had died. She had been a talented singer, a linguist who had traveled the world. Vijay also shared a picture of her and his brother, taken on the Peak in Hong Kong a couple of years before. Their smiling faces spoke of hope and promise.

For no obvious reason other than rabbit hole Internet curiosity, Rozie wanted to know what had happened to the girl. It felt as though Vijay was being coy about it. Had it been a terrible accident? A disease?

She clicked on Vijay’s brother, Selvan, who was tagged in the photos, and he turned out to be another sharer. His feed was full of pictures of himself as a teenager with Anita and friends. In a couple of them, Maksim Brodsky was stretched out on the floor, his limbs languidly arranged for the camera, or sitting, laughing, with one of the girls on his knee.

Rozie checked out Selvan and Vijay’s bios: they had gone to Allingham School. She remembered Vijay telling her that day in the flat that he and Maksim were old school friends. Rozie clicked the link to Anita Moodie’s page. She had gone there, too. According to their birth dates, she must have been in the same year as Selvan, which would be the year between Maksim and Vijay. Judging from the old photographs, they had all hung out together at least a few times.

Back on Selvan’s page, buried in the recent comments were references to Anita’s life “cut short.” “I had no idea about her mental health,” somebody said. Selvan had answered with a crying emoji and a “Me neither. Shock to us all.”

Rozie took a sip of whiskey and felt a tingle travel up her spine. Three people in their midtwenties had died in the past eighteen days, and two of them went to school together. She couldn’t begin to put together how Anita Moodie’s death could be connected to Maksim Brodsky’s, never mind Rachel Stiles’s, but it couldn’t be pure coincidence, could it? Well, it could—but was it?

Behind her and up the hill was the Round Tower, housing DCI Strong’s office. I should go there in the morning, she thought. But she knew she wouldn’t. Sir Simon had told her how uninterested the police were in the detail of Rachel Stiles’s hair on Brodsky’s body. Yes, it was part of their inquiry, but they were much more excited by the knickers. Rozie had studied enough statistical theory at the bank to know how easy it would be to argue for coincidence in the school connection. Young people died. They took drugs and committed suicide. It was tragic, but they did. And, anyway, how would she explain her late-night, online stalking of Vijay Kulandaiswamy—a man she was supposed never to have met?

She felt strangely calm, though. Knocking back the last of her whiskey, she left Art Blakey playing on the laptop, crawled into bed in her clothes, and turned out the light.

It was 9 a.m. when she woke up, with a blinding headache, having somehow failed to set the alarm. Her first thought was to thank heaven it was Sir Simon’s day to deliver the boxes. Rozie knew they would be fuller than usual after the relative ease—from paperwork at least—of the last two days. Yesterday she had personally put together a small selection of letters and cards written to the Queen by members of the public, which she would also want to see. Yes of course the nonagenarian monarch would be working over the weekend to make up for lost time. Sir Simon said she had looked startled and offended when he had gently suggested otherwise.

He would be taking the boxes through in an hour or so. He, and not Rozie. She hadn’t thought about that last night. She wasn’t scheduled to see the Queen at all today, or tomorrow, which was Sunday. She wondered for a minute whether she could wait until Monday to share her discovery. It might not mean anything, after all.

But a man was dead. The Queen cared deeply. So did Rozie.

She made herself a cup of tea and finished off the last of the jam pennies. The headache abated slightly and she felt better after a shower. Ten minutes later she was dressed in a body-hugging pencil skirt, white shirt, and a tailored jacket that had cost her first month’s wages, her hair and minimal makeup done, her feet shod in her signature heels. She had thought of a plan and it just needed a couple of carefully timed phone calls to make it work.

Sir Simon was talking to the master of the Household when she walked past his open office door. He merely tapped his wristwatch and gave her a quizzical look as she went to her own office next door. Timekeeping was not quite so essential at weekends when one was not “on” with the Boss.

Rozie brought up the Queen’s updated schedule for the day on her desktop monitor, paying close attention to the hour before lunch. She made a quick call to the prime minister’s office to talk to Emily, the PM’s private secretary, who had become a friend in the last couple of months.

“We’ve had some thoughts about presents the Cabinet might like to get for the Queen,” Rozie said. “Sir Simon has a list.”

“Oh, does he? Because David’s desperate. He keeps coming up with all these ideas but she’s either got one already, or got it in gold, or Samantha thinks it would be silly, or one of the ministers makes a face and David changes his mind.”

“Simon thought of some brilliant ones yesterday.”

“Fabulous. Because we’ve only got till June and it doesn’t feel like very long if it’s bespoke. Plus of course David’s got a lot on his mind. Thank God she didn’t want anything for her actual birthday. Did the president get her anything?”

“I don’t know.”

Rozie had been manning the office phones during the visit. Sir Simon would have been the one to see. For a second, the surrealness of her job hit her again. If she wanted to know what Barack Obama gave the Queen for her birthday, in private . . . she could just ask.

“Can I talk to him now?” Emily asked. “Simon, I mean.”

“He’s away from his desk. Try him at around eleven.”

“No worries. Thanks, babe.”

Rozie put the phone in its cradle with a satisfying click. Emily was diligent, persistent, and obsessed with the prime minister’s to-do list. The present from the government for the Queen’s official birthday had been high on that list for a long time and she would do anything to tick it off. Rozie then made a couple of other calls.

At eleven, she made sure she was discussing the debrief from yesterday with Sir Simon and the head of castle security. At eleven fifteen, as instructed by Rozie, a clerk from St. Paul’s Cathedral rang him to talk about details of the official birthday Thanksgiving Service. As the minutes ticked by, Sir Simon kept glancing at his watch. The Queen would be finished with the boxes soon. But at eleven thirty his secretary came over to say the prime minister’s office was on the phone for the third time and wanted to talk to him directly, about something quite urgent.

With a sigh and an eye roll, he nodded to her. “I’ll take it.” He gestured to Rozie. “Go and get the boxes. Do you mind?”

Rozie didn’t. When the call came, she walked smartly out of the office, making him marvel once again at how she managed such rapid strides in those skirts and heels.

“Ah, good, it’s you,” the Queen said without surprise, putting the last of the papers back in its box and making sure she hadn’t missed anything.

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Rozie curtsied. Mastering that in a tight skirt had been an interesting learning curve.

The Queen put her teacup in its saucer. “Thank you.”

The coffee maid, who had been hovering in the background, picked up a tray and left the room. The Queen turned back to Rozie.

“Is there any news?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Rozie had practiced several times what she would say, and how to do it without wasting precious time. She told the Queen about Vadim Borovik being beaten up in Soho, reassured her that he was discharged from hospital, and mentioned how Masha Peyrovskaya was worried her husband was the cause. She then explained about last night’s Internet session and the curious coincidence of Anita Moodie’s death.

The Queen was intrigued.

“This girl was good friends with him, you think?”

“Well, they knew each other, definitely. Also, there might be a link with the music department at Allingham. Maksim played piano, of course, and I looked up Anita this morning. She studied music at uni. In fact, she got a diploma in singing.”

“And that’s what she did afterwards? Sing?”

“From what I could tell. She didn’t post much on Facebook, but friends referred to her performing.”

This didn’t entirely fit. The Queen absorbed the information without really knowing what to do with it. “Is it certain it was suicide?” she asked.

“That’s what her friends seem to think. They were all surprised, though.”

“Do you have a picture of her?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Rozie had used her phone to screenshot various pictures from Selvan’s timeline and Anita’s own Facebook page. She leaned down and scrolled through them now, as the Queen peered through her bifocals. They showed a pretty young woman with serious, dark brown eyes and a glossy, reddish bob that swept sharply below her jawline. In each picture she looked nicely presented, in feminine, well-cut clothes. The Queen’s mind was whirring.

“Thank you, Rozie. Very much. You might ask Mr. MacLachlan to look into Anita Moodie for us, would you? It would be interesting to find out a little bit more about her life. Would you mind asking him to find out if she spoke Mandarin Chinese? Also, I wanted to ask, could you possibly discover what sort of underwear Sandy Robertson is supposed to have bought online?”

“Actually, I already did, ma’am. Yesterday,” Rozie said. She regularly popped up to DCI Strong’s little incident room in the Round Tower for a word. Often bearing jam pennies or spare slices of Dundee cake, which went down well.

The Queen looked surprised. “Really?”

“I thought you might be concerned about the purchase.” Which was the polite way of saying they both thought the knickers theory was ridiculous. “They were bought from Marks and Spencer last summer. They were the own-brand’s third most popular line and they sold over a hundred thousand of them. Mr. Robertson maintains he bought them for his daughter, Isla, who lives at home with him. She’s sixteen. He regularly shops for things for her and she has various pairs like it. Of course, that doesn’t prove he didn’t buy others for a different purpose.”

“No. Is DCI Strong very excited about the link?”

“I would say he’s quite excited, ma’am. A hundred thousand is a lot of knickers.”

“Thank you.”

Rozie picked up the boxes and took them back to Sir Simon’s office. He was still on the phone, talking to Emily about engraved silver gilt champagne coasters. He rolled his eyes dramatically, tapped his watch again, and rolled his eyes some more. Rozie laughed. She was really very fond of him.

It was bad to lie to a man like that, but, damn, it was exciting.

21

The Quick Talk Internet Café in Clapham Junction contained three tables, a bar selling stodgy cakes and fizzy drinks, and a counter along the left-hand wall lined with eight computer monitors, six of which worked. It was fairly full for a Sunday morning, with five customers typing away at the keyboards and nursing their drinks. Two women in hijabs chatted quietly to each other, keeping an eye on a sleeping baby in a pram by the door. In the middle, a young man in a T-shirt hunched over his screen, lost in concentration, while the elderly man beside him muttered to himself, scattering his keyboard with cake crumbs as he hit each new key with his middle finger and waited for the result.

The neatly dressed, slightly balding man in an open pea coat nearest the counter had not come here to chat or eat cake. He was on a diet and none of the food suited him. The tea was stewed and crappy. He sipped from a chipped glass of tap water and wished he was at home in his flat in Richmond, with all mod cons and a decent kettle, and a computer he knew his way around better than this one.

But his home computer had its own IP address. He was aware of private browsing protocols, but equally aware that if anything went wrong, the best hackers in the country, working for the government, would be on his case in a heartbeat. Better to be here, in this anonymous little café, a ten-minute train ride away.

Billy MacLachlan had been researching Anita Moodie for twenty minutes, and as far as he was concerned, he had already struck oil with her Instagram feed. The girl was addicted to selfies, and she’d been posting for years. There were over two thousand pictures and he was going through every one of them. This part of the job was no hardship (though that tap water tasted foul; even the tea had been better). The girl liked to travel. She’d lived the high life. She enjoyed beautiful things and beautiful places. He enjoyed looking at them, through carefully chosen filters, pausing to make notes for follow-up research.

There was a pattern to the singing gigs she had done since leaving the School of Oriental and African Studies, where she’d got her first degree. A very interesting pattern. MacLachlan sketched it out in the cheap spiral-bound book beside the keyboard. He took a sip of water, followed it with tea (no, the tea was still worse), and scrolled down some more.

The Queen was not the only person chagrined by the thought that Obama had arrived, with all the intelligence power the CIA could provide, and meanwhile the best brains in the police and MI5 hadn’t been able to solve a little local murder. It wasn’t for lack of trying.

DCI Strong looked up at the board attached to the partition wall in his Round Tower room, displaying an alarming array of suspects and question marks. A lot of people had access to Maksim Brodsky’s room that night, assuming he let them in, or they knew their way around a basic Yale lock. Once there, all it took to actually kill him and stage the scene was a strong pair of hands, a bit of training, and some preparation. But who would want to? That was the problem David Strong kept coming up against.

The director general was still convinced about the sleeper spy theory, and he could be very persuasive. He was known in the intelligence world for a couple of fascinating insights into new and alarming strategies of supposedly friendly nations, based on painstaking backroom research. Patience and attention to detail were Humphreys’s watchwords. Patience, he assumed, had been the key characteristic of the palace sleeper, and if he was right, it had served the man well. The murder had been committed, the crime remained unsolved—from the sleeper’s point of view, it must be seen as a great success.

Although . . .

Strong was too polite to bring this up directly with Humphreys when they met with top brass, which was two or three times a week—but the Russian intelligence community was not gleefully celebrating the brilliant assassination of a dissident under the very nose of Her Majesty the Queen. Or, if they were, they were doing it so quietly that not a whisper of it had made it through to MI6’s ears in the Kremlin and various Russian outposts.

If you’re going to go to all that trouble to kill someone, and kill them in such a way, and after so much time inserting your killer into position, why keep it so firmly under your furry hat? After the killings of Markov in 1978 and Litvinenko in 2006, and the attempt on Gorbuntsov four years ago, the intelligence community had been alight with gossip and speculation, triumphalism and bravado, typical of Putin and his lot. Strong knew this, because he had asked. He wanted to understand Humphreys’s world, and when you work out of Windsor Castle, people tell you things.

This wasn’t the only reason Strong kept the field of suspects open. His natural due diligence was part of it. His team had investigated the ballet dancers exhaustively, and the boyfriend one of them was supposedly FaceTiming. (She was.) They had looked into Peyrovskaya’s maid, even though she was tiny. There was no DNA match with anything in Brodsky’s room. Not conclusive proof she wasn’t involved, but hardly proof she was.

Then there was the girl from the intelligence meeting. She had bumped into Brodsky in the corridor outside his room, after he got back from playing the piano in the Crimson Drawing Room. They had been seen together at the time by a passing housekeeper. She said she had dropped a contact lens and he had helped her find it, and the housekeeper had confirmed her story. For a time, Strong thought she was the last person to see him alive. But why would she attack him? It couldn’t have been planned. She didn’t know she’d even be staying till a few hours before.

Had they had a mad sexual tryst? Had he abused her in some way? Had it gone wrong?

Strong had wondered about this, but then he had made the bombshell discovery about the Russian valet. It was prompted by something the commissioner had said, relating a story he had heard (he said from the Queen herself, although he might have been embellishing) about shenanigans between visitors and servants, and bets about getting people past security and into the guest suites.

This had got Strong thinking one evening last week, as he ran through every possibility once again with his little on-site team of three. Of course, the main security at Windsor Castle was designed to keep out outsiders and, above all, to protect the Royal Family. It wasn’t particularly designed to protect visiting principals, as they were called, from their own servants. Yes, staff were not permitted to head down to the guest suites without an explicit invitation—but if a guest wanted to conspire to play musical beds with their maids and footmen, was there anything specifically to stop him? Or her?

Anyway, it had kicked off an interesting line of inquiry. The footmen and policemen on duty that night had been questioned again, a little more rigorously, and Strong had discovered that Vadim the valet had gone up twice, to visit first the beautiful Masha Peyrovskaya, then his master.

The first time the master had been drinking downstairs with his hedge fund friend so it all made sense. But one of the DIs on the team had noticed a couple of strange details in the footmen’s accounts. The first time, the valet had kept his head turned away from the men in the corridors, talking to his companion, and his suit was grey. The second time, he had looked them square in the face, and his suit was black.

Bit odd. So the team had questioned the valet pretty hard, and in the end he’d cracked. Turned out, he hadn’t been having it off with the gorgeous mistress at all. He was gay, as he’d said, with a steady boyfriend. He had gone along with the story to please her, but the very last thing he wanted was any suggestion that they had done anything together.

It had not been he, Vadim, the first time, who went upstairs with her. Nor any other man with the intention to make love to her—Vadim was sure of that. Masha Peyrovskaya was a precious jewel. She was loyal to her husband, and so excited to be at the castle that night. She would have done nothing to spoil the evening, she was not that kind of woman. In fact, it was Mr. Brodsky who had gone up with her, and they were friends, just friends. They both loved music. Perhaps he had gone to discuss Rachmaninoff?

When they’d talked to Masha, she had sold out Meredith Gostelow instantly. The architect was in Saint Petersburg at the moment for work, so they couldn’t talk to her in person yet, but she hadn’t denied Masha’s claim that she was the object of the young man’s attentions. So, Brodsky had had it off with the old lady, not the young one. Who’d have thought?

Which meant he’d been away from his room for a couple of hours that they’d had no idea about. Strong was ashamed of himself for that. It didn’t explain what happened next, though. The same security staff were certain the man they now knew to be Brodsky had gone back upstairs to the attic corridor alone. Meredith Gostelow had not accompanied him on that last journey. This put paid to Humphreys’s conjecture that, because she was working on a project in Saint Petersburg, the woman was somehow a Putinesque, middle-aged Mata Hari, sent in to seduce and murder Brodsky after chicken and petits fours. Shame, though. Strong had rather liked that idea.

Vadim could have killed Brodsky himself, when he got back from putting Peyrovski to bed, Strong considered. Again, why? Because Brodsky had impersonated him? Murder seemed a bit of an overreaction.

The person who seemed most terrified about the whole thing was Meredith Gostelow. From her hotel room in Saint Petersburg she kept begging them not to say anything, because of her reputation as an international architect. (Strong had never heard of her. That didn’t prove much, though, in the world of international architecture.)

Anyway, luckily for her, there was little danger of this nugget of information leaking out, because absolute paranoia about headlines in the press meant that this was the tightest, most-locked-down murder investigation Strong had ever conducted, or was likely to. His micro team were the most loyal men and women he could hope to work with. No documents were left lying around, ever. No stray messages made their way onto WhatsApp groups. Other officers at the Met, helping with research and interviews, were given strictly limited background details. All questions, even from close friends in the force, were met with bland replies. Even so, various very senior government officials and Humphreys’s underlings would get in touch at regular intervals to make dire and unnecessary threats about what would happen if they were ever careless.

Only Singh trusted them to get on with their job and do it properly, the way they’d been trained. Strong liked the Met commissioner. He took a lot of crap and didn’t pass it down the chain.

Meanwhile, Vadim Borovik had been the victim of this so-called homophobic attack in an alley off Dean Street in Soho. Strong was pretty sure that was a private matter to do with Peyrovski and his wife. He looked at his board again. Should he get the commissioner to tell Her Majesty about that, and about Brodsky being out and about after lights-out? She probably had better things to think about. It was up to men like him to deal with the nasty details.

An email alert arrived on his laptop with a ping. He opened it and swore loudly. This was something the Queen would want to know about. He was just glad he wasn’t the one who would have to break the news.

22

It was the last quiet week at Windsor, before a return to town. Although “quiet” was always a relative word for the castle, and especially so with the horse show coming up in just over a fortnight, and over a thousand horses to accommodate. Philip was in his element.

“I’m off to Home Park to see how the obstacles are coming on for the driving.”

He was standing by the door, jacket on, car keys in hand. The Queen looked at her watch. In less than ninety minutes she had a meeting with the master of the fabric of St. George’s Chapel, to look at a proposal for more attractive nighttime illumination. You wouldn’t think that lighting an ancient building from the outside would be a major issue, but for the denizens of Windsor, the furore over white light versus slightly blue overshadowed the whole debate about Brexit. She needed a clear head for it.

“I might come with you.”

It was a five-minute run in a Range Rover down to the arenas in Home Park, within sight of Castle Hill, which rose majestically behind them now, above the trees. Philip, as ranger of Windsor Great Park, took his role very seriously and liked to inspect any important goings-on—and nothing was as important as the latest Royal Windsor Horse Show, which was about to play host to a record number of horses, several thousand visitors, and a television team from ITV.

At the moment, the land in question was a quagmire, lined with flatbed trucks and metal tracks and endless stacks of portable barriers. The foreman of works, anxious in steel-toed boots and a construction hat, pointed out areas of grass where the horse boxes would be parked, water and food provided, and where the shopping tents would go.

Further along, work was being done to improve the grandstands.

“The Queen’s been coming since forty-three,” Philip was telling the foreman. “Since the first one. They had dogs in the show then, too. Until a Labrador snaffled the King’s chicken sandwich and they were banned forever.” His barking laugh caused the foreman to take a step backwards.

“Actually, it was a lurcher,” she corrected him, coming over. “And they raised over three hundred thousand pounds. Enough for seventy-eight Typhoons.”

“The tea, ma’am?” the foreman asked, crinkling his brow in puzzlement.

“The aircraft. We used them to help win the war.”

“My granddad was at Dunkirk, ma’am,” the foreman ventured more confidently, since they were being conversational.

“Oh was he? How interesting. Did he survive the war?”

“Yes, ma’am. He played football for Sheffield Wednesday. He passed away five years ago. Fit as a flea till near the end.”

“Good for him,” she said. Though she was thinking the gentleman would have been not much older than she was. A generation hanging on by its fingernails.

Back in the castle, she felt grateful for that little burst of fresh air. Now she was plunged into a thousand details to consider. The whole family would be descending again, along with the King of Bahrain and his entourage. There was the question of the bedding for room 225, the preferred suite for special guests. A housekeeper had noticed that the favored linen was slightly frayed. Obviously they couldn’t use it, but should they recommission the Edwardian embroidery, and what to replace it with in the meantime? And would Margaret’s children mind not sleeping in their usual rooms, because they were needed for someone else? And then it was time to visit the master of the fabric in his den near the chapel, and oversee the fateful decision about the lights.

That done, there was a message from the trainer to say that Barbers Shop had pulled a muscle during a workout and was less than 100 percent certain for the show. It would be a tragedy if he couldn’t make it. He had a real chance for the Ridden Show Horse and thoroughly deserved it, and anyway, she hadn’t seen him for months and was looking forward to his arrival from Essex with his trainer. When Sir Simon approached her in the Grand Corridor, looking dour, she said, “No bad news, thank you. I’ve had quite enough for today.”

But he didn’t give his little sardonic smile. Instead his face hardened. “It could be worse, Your Majesty.”

Which was hardly cheering.

“Come in. Tell me.”

They went to the Oak Room, overlooking the quadrangle, where she sat down and he explained that Sandy Robertson, her favorite page, had taken an overdose of pills and was recovering at St. Thomas’s Hospital, having been discovered at home in Pimlico by his daughter.

“Thank you, Simon.”

She looked utterly bereft, he thought. Bleak and defeated. He backed out of the room quickly to give her time to wipe away a tear if she needed to.

Alone, she took a breath.

“Bastard,” she muttered, and she didn’t mean poor Sandy.

Days passed without noticeable progress. In the kitchens, the laundry rooms, and the master of the Household’s offices, nerves crackled and tempers frayed as everyone got by on too much coffee and too little sleep. In one of the cold rooms, the pastry chef was pouring a third batch of chocolate into molds for a new type of truffle to be served at one of the big receptions in a fortnight. He had been trying to get the ganache finish right for two days now, and it refused to work. He only had a few hours left in this room, with these molds, before he had to pack up his section’s equipment to take back to Buckingham Palace. They only took the essential, personal implements they liked to work with every day, but even so, it added up. Then he’d be straight into garden party preparation before heading back here for the horse show, with only three days on-site to get ready.

The underbutler, who had speculated so accurately about the initial police investigation into Mr. Brodsky’s sex life at the castle, was busy wondering if she was in the right place. For years, the idea of working for the Queen had been a dream. Then, after her top-class training, she was thrilled out of her mind when she passed the final interview. But for the last few days she hadn’t got to bed before one in the morning. Each shift seemed to bleed into the next. And this morning she got shouted at by Prince Andrew for accidentally blocking a doorway while carrying two heavy chairs. She wouldn’t mind, but what was it for? When loyal servants like lovely Sandy Robertson got suddenly sent home, and everyone told not to contact him, and now there was a rumor the poor man was in hospital. Is that what it came to? Is that all you got? There were websites offering six-figure salaries in big houses in warm countries for people with her background. Tonight, she might have another look at them.

In his study in the Norman Tower, overlooking his private garden in the old moat, Sir Peter Venn went over his list of meetings for the following week, ready to take over as titular head of the castle while the Queen was away. He sensed the unrest in the kitchens and corridors. Normally, that would calm down once a big event was over, but at the same time, he was acutely aware of the police team in the Round Tower next door, still busy with their investigation. Yesterday, out of the blue, he had been contacted by a journalist asking awkward questions about the Russian and why the autopsy report was not available. It was only a matter of time before idle curiosity turned into something more serious and somebody really started digging. Then all hell would be let loose.

Meanwhile, the head housekeeper had given him the updated plans for guest accommodation during the horse show. His wife, who was normally a paragon of unflappability, was in a bit of a panic. Over the years she had hosted ambassadors, field marshals, two astronauts, and several duchesses, but even she wasn’t sure how to impress the likes of Ant and Dec and Kylie Minogue.

Rozie felt the rumblings in the air, like summer thunder. She tried not to worry, but she saw how hard everyone was working and sensed that something fragile was holding the castle family together. It was the same thing that made her not mind too much when cousin Fran had to schedule the wedding around her. And made her want to work on her days off, and put up with a damp outside wall in her bedroom, and accept she wouldn’t be around for family Christmases and birthdays.

It was something about duty and trust and affection, but it worked both ways. What was happening to Sandy Robertson felt as if it was shaking the foundations of the castle. And what would happen then? What would all these people do who were giving up their lives—giving them willingly—to make one person happy? If the trust was gone, if the affection soured? It would be an earthquake, and the whole edifice could come tumbling down.

Rozie did what she always tried to do when she sensed the stress was getting to her: she got changed and went for a lunchtime run. Putting the miles behind her round the Great Park, she tried to make sense of what she knew. It was Rachel Stiles the police should be focusing on, surely? The girl drank; she took drugs; her DNA was found in Brodsky’s room. Did she kill him and commit suicide? But what about the new girl—Anita Moodie? Did Stiles kill her, too?

After forty minutes of lung-punishing exertion, Rozie knew she hadn’t made much progress in fixing the problem—but she felt better anyway.

“You’re looking chipper,” Sir Simon observed when she got back to the office. “Good news about your mother?”

Lying shamelessly, she gave a detailed health update on the hip. The endorphin high got her through the afternoon.

The week was coming to an end. Billy MacLachlan sat at the wheel of his four-year-old Honda Civic on Saturday lunchtime and marveled, not for the first time, at how bloody far away Suffolk was from . . . anywhere. Very nice when you got there, but for God’s sake. Bloody miles.

His car radio lost the signal for the classical station he’d been listening to and he used the silence to mull over the conversation he’d had with a young woman in Edgware yesterday. She was a teacher at a posh girls’ school in North London. Music, with a sideline in netball coaching. He’d caught her between lunchtime choir practice and a warm-up session for the Fourth Form B team, huddled at the back of an empty classroom cradling staff room coffees in thick, ceramic mugs.

Escort.

She had definitely said the word “escort.” After about half an hour of talking, when she’d warmed up and the coffee had gone cold. He’d check his phone recording later, but he was sure of it. As in, “I know she was doing well, but even so, she liked nice clothes and, like, once I saw her in this amazing coat and then I realized it was this-season Gucci. And she had an Anya Hindmarch cross-body bag I’d wanted for ages and when I asked if she found it on Vinted she said no, it was new. And her main bag was Mulberry, and that looked new, too. Not being funny or anything, but I did even wonder a couple of times . . . I shouldn’t say this.”

“Go on.”

“OK, so . . . Not being mean, but I wondered whether she was an escort. I know, it’s silly. Anita wasn’t that kind of girl. I mean, she was quite private mostly, with men. But she had a lot of nice things, and she wasn’t the best singer in our year. She was good but . . . She was just lucky, I suppose.”

Lucky, possibly. Talented, certainly. Anita Moodie had been at college with this girl, studying for a diploma in vocal performance. MacLachlan was building up a picture of her through conversations with old friends. To some, he was an old teacher, devastated to hear of her death and keen to find out about her later life. To others, he was a reporter, doing a piece on suicide. The police might pass this way later, and if they did, he didn’t want them to notice who exactly had gone before. In a couple of hours, when he eventually got all the way to Woodbridge, he would be an old family friend, gathering reminiscences to pass on to her relatives in Hong Kong.

The Anita he was getting to know was a fiercely ambitious girl. After boarding school in Hampshire she had studied music at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, focusing on the musical traditions of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. She had followed it with the diploma at the Royal College of Music, where she was known as a steady if not stellar performer.

It was in her final year at SOAS that friends started noticing her improved lifestyle. She rented the same kind of flats as them in grotty parts of London, but she went on more holidays; wore better clothes; and drove her own car, a bubblegum-pink Fiat 500—all captured to perfection in her stylized Instagram posts.

With the exception of that teacher friend, they put the new bling down to Anita’s success finding work on cruises and at elaborate parties in foreign locations. There were several images of her in grand hotels in hot locations: the kind of places that had fountains in the courtyard and McLaren supercars parked under palm trees. Anita looked increasingly at home in ball gowns, under glittering chandeliers. She eventually put a deposit down on a nice flat in Greenwich with a river view, not far from the O₂.

What girl in her twenties could afford her own flat in London? Some friends assumed it was family money, but those who knew her well said her parents lived modestly in Hong Kong, running a language school, and it had been a struggle to cover her boarding school fees.

So. Who paid for the rent and the fancy handbags? Did she have some sort of sugar daddy? One of her school friends said that she had remained very close to her A-level music teacher. Maybe a thing for older men? The guy had retired to Suffolk and had agreed to a meeting. MacLachlan kept his mind open. Maybe Mr. de Vekey had been . . . paternalistic. Or maybe he hadn’t been in touch for ten years and would have nothing to say.

But it hadn’t sounded like that when MacLachlan had called to arrange a meeting. De Vekey had seemed shocked and shaky and unsettled. A man with a lot on his mind.

As the A12 gradually unfurled its way through Essex towards the coast, MacLachlan wondered what exactly that might be.

23

After tea, the Queen made her way to her private chapel. Following the fire in ’92, the old one had been made into the Lantern Lobby and used as a hall for welcoming guests. As it was where the blaze had started, the thought of worshipping there had been simply beyond her.

She would have come round in time, she saw now. Time heals almost everything. But she still didn’t regret the decision.

The new chapel, created out of a converted passageway, had a glorious faux-Gothic ceiling made of green oak lined with cerulean blue. It was a family affair: her most personal contribution to the fabric of the place. Charles had been on the architectural committee, David Linley had made the altar, which was quite plain, as she liked them, and Philip had worked with a master craftsman to design the stained-glass window, which she passed on her way in.

The window was a work of art threaded with memories. The top trio of images depicted the Trinity, raised serenely above a grey-green vista of the castle and the park. God was looking down on them, holding the Household in his loving care. The bottom three encapsulated the day of the fire itself. In the middle, Saint George stood over a red-eyed dragon; to the left, a volunteer held a rescued portrait; to the right, a firefighter battled the flames, with the Brunswick Tower lit like a torch behind him. Philip’s original idea for this last had been a phoenix, rising, which she had liked very much, but she preferred the final version. The castle did not rebuild itself: a tight-knit team did that, brilliantly, after the firemen battled night and day to contain the damage.

They were all part of her wider family and she still felt indebted to them, as one would. Though ’92 remained her annus horribilis, she felt grateful each time she came in here, for what had followed. “Fear not, for I am with you.” “I am your strength and shield.” As a little girl she had been taught that if one was steadfast, one would see good triumph in the end. During the war, it was at Windsor that she had sheltered. It took a long time, sometimes, but it was true.

She sat in her usual seat, a crimson chair near the altar. Turning her thoughts to the present, she prayed for the Russian and the City girl and also the singer, whose role she was yet to fully understand. She prayed for her family, small and large, and gave thanks for the future generations who were starting out so well. Now, if only Harry could find a decent girl, that would be something. She prayed for insight, and the power to use what she had already learned to bring light into the current darkness before any more young lives were lost.

She was tempted to pray for insight into the three fifteen at Wincanton tomorrow, but God did not answer betting prayers. The race required luck and judgment, born of years of experience and application, much like life.

It was at about this time, as he joined the North Circular from the A13 on his way back from East Anglia, that MacLachlan noticed the black BMW M6 three cars behind. He’d happened to spot one just like it on the way up. It had caught his eye because it was sleek and fast, and a model he wouldn’t mind upgrading to—if ever they decided to double his pension. And because he was that way inclined, he’d noticed the diplomatic plates. He braked gently and pulled into the inside lane. The M6 coupe slid by a few moments later. Same plates. The driver even turned his head to look.

Numpties, he’d thought to himself. If you’re going to do it, at least find some nondescript car and do it properly. All the same, he’d felt his heart rate go up as he put his foot back on the accelerator.

Now that he was fully concentrating, he noticed the white Prius, too, about twenty minutes later. This one was older and had standard license plates, just like a thousand Ubers. But it had started to sit about six cars behind soon after he reached Tower Bridge. He saw it drift in and out of view, never more than a couple of minutes out of sight, until he turned off the A4 at Chiswick, the other side of London, not far from home. Which could have been pure coincidence, except he’d added half an hour to his journey by going a convoluted route via Battersea, crossing the river north to south at Chelsea Bridge and south to north again at Putney: a journey that no satnav, however bonkers, would take. They were definitely following him, until they were sure where he was going. Good enough to use two cars. Amateur enough to use both of them badly, thank God.

So it was later than he’d anticipated by the time he got home, and too late to put in a call to Windsor Castle tonight. He’d have called the APS, but on a weekend he judged it would be just as efficient to call Her Majesty direct, if he timed it right. Around sevenish, between drinks and dinner, usually did the trick. It used to surprise him, how quickly she took his calls, if she was free to talk privately. Now he just accepted it as one of the things the gutter press would kill their grannies to know—but would never find out. He’d have to wait till tomorrow, but he was a patient man.

The Queen was about to dress for dinner on Sunday evening when her assistant dresser brought in a telephone: the old-fashioned kind, anything but “smart,” with a base and a receiver.

“Call for you, ma’am. Mr. MacLachlan.”

“Thank you.”

The dresser retired. The Queen glanced at herself in the dressing table mirror (tired, a little puffy) and lifted the receiver.

“Billy, how nice of you to call.”

“Pleasure, Your Majesty. I think I’ve got what you were looking for. That Moodie girl didn’t take her own life—not if all my sources are correct. Also, you asked if she spoke Chinese and she did. She studied Mandarin at school and spoke Cantonese at home in Hong Kong. I had a nose around to see if she spoke Russian, too, just in case, but I don’t think so. She led an interesting life, you might say. Definitely something not quite right about it.”

“Tell me as much as you can. I have about seven minutes.”

“That’ll be ample, ma’am.”

He proceeded to fill her in on his investigations into the Instagram account and conversations with Anita Moodie’s friends. “Then, yesterday, I visited her old teacher,” he added. “She was in a bad way when she went to see him, a couple of days before she died. He assumed it was boy trouble, put it down to her artistic temperament et cetera, but she hadn’t ever been like that before. And she was really bad, you know what I mean, not just sad and weepy but really losing it. She was sitting in a spot on his lawn, he said, and rocking backwards and forwards, mumbling things he mostly couldn’t understand. She’d seemed beside herself. Despairing.”

“Doesn’t that suggest suicide?” the Queen wondered. That was what the girl’s friends thought, though it had come out of the blue.

“You might think,” MacLachlan said, “but once Mr. de Vekey got talking, he changed his mind about how she’d come across—her mood, you know what I mean. She thought she was going to die. He couldn’t calm her, he couldn’t console her. And he said now he came to think about it she hadn’t been upset so much as terrified. Scared out of her wits.”

The Queen didn’t like the sound of this teacher. “Didn’t he think to warn anyone? Her parents? If she was in such a bad way.”

“He said she told him not to.”

The Queen didn’t bother to ask the chief inspector how he had got the information out of the man in that case, because MacLachlan’s talents in that direction were the reason she relied on him.

“What would you like me to do now, ma’am? I ought to warn you, though, they’re on to me.”

“Who?”

He told her about the black and white cars. “The diplomatic plates come from an Arabian embassy. Small country. Friendly. Hard to imagine them arranging an assassination.” He named the country in question, and she agreed.

She thought about it.

“Don’t do anything more for now. Thank you, but I think that’s enough excitement for the time being. Will you be all right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he assured her. He’d like to see them try something. “Just let me know.”

But already her mind was elsewhere. The pieces of the puzzle were all there. She just needed to connect them. The basic shape of it was clear, and had been for a while, but some stubborn details refused to fit.

She could perhaps have solved it that evening, but as soon as she ended the call, her dresser was back with fresh stockings to put on, and then it was time for the last dinner at Windsor for a week, which was full of friends and family.

That night, as she picked up her diary, she briefly thought about the police interview with Rachel Stiles in her flat in the Isle of Dogs (near the Millennium Dome, where one had spent what was truly one of the most ghastly nights of one’s life, which put a certain slant on things), and the eyes, and that single strand of hair. And those knickers. Why the knickers? She could not make sense of that at all.

As she often did when a problem seemed intractable, she decided to sleep on it. But the clock was ticking. If she was right, that meant the hideous Humphreys was partly right, too, and that meant the country was in danger until it was sorted out.