A Three Dog Problem
- Автор: Беннет Си Джей
- Серия: Her Majesty the Queen Investigates #2
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Zaffre - Bonnier Publishing Fiction
- ISBN: 978-1-83877-485-1
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «A Three Dog Problem». Краткое содержание книги:
When a body is found in the Palace swimming pool, she finds herself once again in the middle of an investigation which has more twists and turns than she could ever have suspected. With her trusted secretary Rozie by her side, the Queen is determined to solve the case. But will she be able to do it before the murderer strikes again?
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Rozie said. She must have picked up on the past tense. ‘Did your wife pass away?’
He nodded briskly. ‘Yes. Heart attack. A long time ago. Sorry, what else? Ah – the artist on the stairs. That is indeed, well done you, Cézanne.’
‘What?’ She stared at him. ‘Really?’
‘Very small. Very pretty. I do adore his trees.’
‘Was it your wife’s?’
‘No, but good guess. I admired it when I was working for a wealthy widow in Hampshire. I advise on art collections, you see, and hers was outstanding. It helped that her husband had been a Scandinavian billionaire, but she had a good eye. Anyway, when she died . . .’ He waved a hand.
‘Lucky you.’
‘Lucky me, as you say.’
‘Why put it up the stairs?’
‘Because it’s funny,’ he explained. ‘Of course, it’s the most valuable thing I own. Like keeping your Oscar in the downstairs loo. What was the other thing? Oh yes, leaving London. I had to move out. I lost a friend there and it was too painful. But I still miss it. The palace, particularly.’
‘I can imagine,’ she said. ‘I have a room there, overlooking the lake. It’s—’
‘I don’t mean Buckingham Palace – I mean St James’s.’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s much more interesting than Buckingham Palace. Did you know it’s still the official residence of the monarch?’
Rozie shook her head. ‘So that’s why the ambassadors are appointed to it.’
‘Exactly. Henry VIII had it built on the site of a leper hospital.’ Sholto warmed to his theme. ‘And Buckingham Palace was built on the site of a failed mulberry orchard. The Boss once told me that James I wanted to produce silk, but got black mulberry trees instead of white ones, so the silkworms weren’t interested. She loves it when things go wrong in history. I find Buckingham Palace so ugly, don’t you? That awful façade. They should get rid of it.’
Rozie stared. ‘No façade? But what about the balcony?’
‘Oh, they’d cope.’ Sholto waved a hand dismissively. ‘They could build another one. The whole East Front has only looked that way since 1913. We think of it as ancient, but honestly, it’s nothing, in royal terms. Now, I really think we need a little whisky, don’t you? I’ll find us a decent bottle.’
In her bedroom in the North Wing, the Queen reflected on how she used to be able to see the Palace from her parents’ house on Piccadilly and wave to ‘Grandpa England’. It had seemed magical then. Today, it was grimmer than she’d known it for a long time.
The servants’ hall, she knew, was still rife with speculation about the body in the pool. The press and various magazines were offering huge bounties for recent pictures of the inside of the north-west pavilion, and so far they hadn’t got any. The staff were behaving with admirable decorum on that front, though it helped that there was a permanent guard at the door these days.
The media were far more obsessed with the fact that Buckingham Palace had a pool. Philip’s alarm had been well founded: there were screeds of articles speculating on the royals’ ‘luxury spa’ lifestyle and complaining about the ‘extortionate’ Sovereign Grant paid by the Treasury each year to fund it.
She was waiting for them to pick up the story of the poison pen campaign. They called that sort of thing ‘trolling’ these days, apparently. At least if they did, one could point to an ongoing police investigation into the matter. It made it look as though one was actually doing something – which of course one was, though she suspected it was not enough.
Was it possible that, in the midst of a cruel campaign against various female staff members, the violent death of one of them could be an accident? The Queen longed for reassurance that it was, but she was equally certain, deep down, that she wouldn’t believe it if she got it. The chief inspector was due to make his first report tomorrow. She looked forward very much to hearing what he had to say.
David Strong, for his part, was not particularly looking forward to reporting to Her Majesty. He found her faintly terrifying, for reasons he couldn’t quite pinpoint. She was hardly known for her towering intellect, but he had found, on his first case working for her at Windsor, that she was a hell of a lot sharper than she looked. Mistakes were picked up on. Dry comments were made. Eyes were rolled. He didn’t want the Queen of England rolling her eyes at him tomorrow afternoon. Seriously not.
Which was why, at half past eleven at night, he was still up with his sergeant, in their makeshift office at the Palace, going over what they knew – which wasn’t as much as he’d have liked. It had taken time to set up and get to grips with the environment. Far from a bank of computers in the Ballroom, he and Detective Sergeant Highgate had a padlocked cubbyhole in the South Wing on the floor above the Master’s office for conducting interviews, two secure office laptops, some notepads and a couple of wonky chairs that had seen better days. The air vice-marshal didn’t want them to get too comfortable, he assumed. No problem. Strong always worked better when he was uncomfortable.
To start with, there was just the language. He and DS Highgate were working their way through acronyms and nicknames as fast as they could. They were almost as bad as the Met. SJP was St James’s Palace, KP was Kensington Palace, the APS was that lovely, capable Nigerian girl, Rozie. Could you call her Nigerian when she came from London? He wasn’t sure. Nigerian heritage, that was probably it. The D of E was the Duke of Edinburgh (he knew that). Welly B was Wellington Barracks, where the soldiers who guarded the Palace were housed. The current lot were the Welsh Guards, who were known as the Foreign Legion for some reason. Strong’s mother was Welsh and he felt slightly offended, but hadn’t said so. For professional purposes, he greeted everything he was told with a smile, a nod and silence, which was generally interpreted as approval – whether it was or not.
He didn’t smile about the poolside accident, though. The woman sounded like an old bat, but still . . .
‘First off, the cause of death,’ he said to his sergeant. ‘Nothing new on HOLMES?’
DS Highgate, who had been tasked with checking up on the Met’s incident room database, shook his head. ‘No updates to speak of. The pathologist didn’t find any signs of violence, other than what can be explained by the dropping of the glass and the fall. “Laceration of the posterior tibial artery”. Looks like nothing, but you can easily bleed out if you don’t get to A & E in time.’
‘What d’you think of my suicide idea?’ Strong said. ‘She was under pressure, and the harassment was escalating in the days before she died?’
‘Nah.’ Highgate was unconvinced. ‘Too nasty.’
‘People cut their wrists. Why not an ankle?’
‘Why do it there? She had access to a bathroom with a bit of privacy. Everyone says she was a massive Queen fan. Person, not band. Why subject Her Maj to the publicity?’
‘Fair point,’ Strong acknowledged. The good thing about Andrew Highgate was that they tended to disagree about things. It kept Strong on his toes and lessened the risk of confirmation bias. He’d done the same for his boss in times past. ‘ABC, though,’ he added.
‘I’ll keep it in mind,’ Highgate promised. Strong had re-inforced the mantra from day one: Assume nothing; believe no one; check everything. Or as Strong generally preferred: Arrest everyone; believe no one. Except you couldn’t really do that here.