The Windsor Knot

Technocratic heads of MI5, it seemed, did not.

The Queen had not bothered to try to correct Mr. Humphreys. He seemed so certain of himself and so little interested in her opinion, even though she had met Putin and ruled alongside him, temporally speaking, for decades.

Dogs. They knew. Like Candy this morning. The corgis had hated Mr. Putin on sight and tried to nip his ankles during a state visit. Even a minister’s guide dog had barked, she remembered. Dogs have such natural instincts. Putin used them to his advantage. He knew that Angela Merkel was afraid of them. Was that because she was brought up in East Germany, the Queen wondered, where they were more likely to be trained as guard dogs rather than pets? Armed with this information, he had ensured the German chancellor was met by two aggressive German shepherds when she came to visit him in the Kremlin. The poor woman. It was a mark of the smallness of the man. The Queen did not always agree with Mrs. Merkel’s politics, but she was fond of her. Merkel had managed to stay at the helm of a great democracy for a decade. She was a woman in a man’s world—as it most certainly had been when she started. As it still was, if one went by the photographs at meetings of heads of state: Merkel’s, the only trouser suit in a sea of trousers. The Queen knew very much how that felt—although of course she did not share Merkel’s rather Teutonic sense of fashion.

She realized she hadn’t written anything in her diary for about ten minutes and tried to get back to the sentence she had left half finished, but her mind continued on its train of thought.

Putin was absolutely the sort of man who would seek to make a woman like Merkel uncomfortable. He was a bully, an ex–KGB officer with an unhealthy fondness for control. His attitude to canines, and theirs to him, said it all. Yet this did not mean he would have a very junior young expat killed on one’s own turf. When such a thing was so unnecessary.

According to Humphreys, this cold and calculating man had established a spy in her Household just in case one of his enemies should come to visit—a very junior enemy indeed—so that he could show off the extent of his power. And when that moment had come, this “sleeper”—who had presumably been in place for years, simply waiting—had set up an elaborate attempt to suggest suicide and had failed to check the simplest of knots. Why suggest suicide at all if you wanted to make a statement about yourself? Was the idea that the police would realize it was murder after all? If so, surely there were more subtle ways of doing so than to make the whole sordid affair look so ham-fistedly botched. She liked to think that if one did have a traitor in one’s midst, he would at least be half competent. Oh, the whole thing was unutterably ridiculous.

And yet, “It wouldn’t be the first time. . . .”

Well, no, it wouldn’t. And that had seemed impossible, too.

Anthony Blunt was her first surveyor of pictures, having worked for her father before her. What an erudite, cultured man, so at home among the courtiers. A Cambridge don, he was an art historian, an expert on Poussin and the Sicilian Baroque, and a member of MI5 himself. He had saved her uncle Edward from embarrassment by rescuing some of his letters during the closing stages of the war.

He was also, as he later confessed, a long-term committed Communist and a Soviet agent. He and his friends had caused untold damage to the people she held most dear. He had remained at work at the palace for years after she was told, to spare the shame and embarrassment of admitting how far he had come—until Margaret Thatcher let the cat out of the bag and Blunt had to go. He seemed repentant for some of it, but one could never be sure.

She couldn’t pretend that all her servants were above reproach. There had even been a play by Alan Bennett, and the BBC had made a film of it, with a comic actress who portrayed her as a prig and a frump. Not the Crown’s finest hour in any sense.

Gavin Humphreys’s words brought back unpleasant memories and made her doubt herself, which was not something she particularly liked to do. Nor did she enjoy having to rely on Rozie Oshodi when the girl was so new and so young. But one did what one had to. And hoped to be pleasantly surprised.

She wrote another paragraph about something else entirely and drifted off, with difficulty, to sleep.