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?
Chapter 15
Up at dawn on Tuesday, Rozie breezed up the M4 to the sounds of Farming Today on Radio 4. It was almost a straight line due east to the Palace. She was back in London before the traffic clogged the roads, feeling fully recharged, and managed to wangle a precious parking space in the Royal Mews, so that she even had time to nip up to her room in the West Wing and change.
Buying the candle would be a crazy extravagance. She’d looked it up online and the cheapest version was over sixty pounds. Her mother must never know. But she could imagine it now, as she fetched a skirt and jacket out of the wardrobe, filling this little room with heady scents of tobacco, leather and rum. She would have flowers by the bed: just a small posy of . . . something. She wasn’t an expert on flowers, but she was pretty sure she could do a deal with the Palace florist, and she would learn how to make coffee that fantastic if it killed her.
Had Sholto really meant it about the spare room in The Old Haberdashery? He’d seemed sincere enough. The idea of having a bolthole to escape to whenever she needed it was . . . it was almost unimaginable for a girl from a Notting Hill housing estate. It was the kind of thing her posh friends had had at uni and in the army. ‘Oh, you must come to Shropshire this summer. My parents will be away. It’ll be just us and the dogs. It’s an absolute tip and a bugger to heat. You can have one of the spare rooms.’ And her bosses at the bank, of course, whose houses were never ‘absolute tips’, thanks to small armies of housekeepers and gardeners. The Queen had three such places: two castles and a country estate – but she was the Queen, so fair enough. For Rozie, a cosy single room with a Cézanne on the landing wall outside would do nicely.
She put on the skirt, changed her shirt for a fresh one, and was slipping into her signature heels when she noticed something peeking out from between the pillows on the bed. It was the pale white corner of an envelope.
For a moment she felt as if she was free-falling into an abyss, so hard and fast she almost reached out for a belay rope. Her head was full of the buzzing of bees.
Knowing what it was, she forced herself to walk across the floor, bend down and pick up the paper that burned at her touch. In here. In her bedroom. With slightly shaking hands, she had to press hard to get the traction she needed to tear it open. The sender had gummed it closed. Would there be saliva traces? Even now she was wondering how to find him and stop him. Her chest was tight, her heart pumped fast. Her mouth was dry.
The note inside was folded three times, like the last one. She pulled it out between two fingertips. Same cheap paper as before. Heart hammering, she scanned the contents. Under two lines of writing in capital letters like before, there were the same crude doodles of jungle life, and a new one, horizontal across the bottom: a knife.
She even recognised the type. Though roughly sketched in blue biro, it was clearly a double-edged fighting knife, a Fairbairn Sykes, shaped like a dagger, as used by the Commandos in the Second World War. Those knives were legendary in the forces. She had seen a couple out in Afghanistan and been offered one as a gift. Outside the kitchen or army-sanctioned combat, knives were not her thing, though, and she had politely refused. Now, she folded the note, put it back in its envelope, and stood for a full minute, trying to numb herself to the shock.
You thought you fitted in. You grew up within walking distance of this place. You got the grades, learned your manners, made your family proud. The army used you as a bloody poster girl – which was one of the reasons she’d left it in the end – and yet whatever you did, wherever you went, there was always someone ready to shame you, dismiss you, erase you. The hurt burned. She wanted to punch something very hard. She wanted to tear this room apart and scream until she ran out of breath.
But she stood silently, listening to her shallow breathing, waiting for the moment to pass.
Because it was what he wanted, this private humiliation she did not deserve. He would not get it.
When she had decided what to do, she slid the envelope into the front pocket of her laptop bag, next to her office pass. Then she went to her wardrobe, pulled out a pile of hoodies and tracksuit trousers and retrieved a box of trainers at the bottom. From this, she took out the first envelope, which had been sitting underneath the trainers inside. She slid it into the laptop bag beside the new one.
From the moment the first note had arrived, she had tried to suppress her feelings. Then the death of Cynthia Harris a few days later had given her other things to think about. But it wasn’t that easy. The shock was still raw.
Soon she would go downstairs and deal with this. Her regimental specialism had been ‘find, strike, destroy, suppress’. She wasn’t going to let herself get derailed by some words and doodles on a scrap of paper. First, she needed to sit on the edge of the bed for a moment. Breathe, and count to twenty. Count to twenty again, get up and move on.
The Queen emerged from under the hairdryer hood and sat quietly as Ellie, her hairdresser, removed the rollers at her dressing table. She noticed Ellie squinting at the results and looked more closely herself.
‘Oh dear. What did we do?’
Their eyes met in the glass.
‘I don’t know, ma’am. I could swear I put them in exactly the same as always.’
Ellie looked mortified. But the Queen could have sworn to it too. Nothing had seemed out of the ordinary as each roller was systematically applied – and yet here were two curls, far too tight and entirely out of place, making her look like an elderly Shirley Temple (Wallis Simpson used to call one Shirley, not out of any kindness), and resisting all Ellie’s attempt to tame them.
‘More lacquer?’ the Queen suggested.
‘I’ll do what I can, ma’am. Do you have a quiet day?’
Her voice was hopeful, but the answer was sadly no, unless you counted the Patriarch of Moscow and various other religious potentates in the morning, and the combined medallists of the British Olympic and Paralympic teams in the evening as ‘quiet’. Half the family would be there to attend the reception. She needed to look, if not her very best, then at least presentable.
‘Let’s try again after lunch,’ she said with a sigh.
‘Very good, ma’am. I’ll have everything ready.’
Half an hour later, when Rozie entered her study, she could have sworn the girl did a double take. The Queen would have liked to say something about the wayward curls and laugh it off, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to this morning. Hair was too important. It shouldn’t be, but it was, and that was that.
‘Did you have a successful time in the Cotswolds?’ she asked, hoping to be cheered up by news of Sholto Harvie’s famous hospitality.
‘Yes, Your Majesty. In a way. Very.’
The young woman’s bleak tone entirely belied the words she spoke. The poor thing sounded if anything more edgy than before. This was not about curls. The Queen peered at her from over her bifocals.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘You’re not.’
‘No, ma’am. Not really.’
‘We can talk about the Cotswolds in a minute. What is it?’
Whatever her APS had been holding back – and the Queen now realised there had been something for a while – the time had come for her to share it. Rozie took out a folded piece of paper from the folder she was holding, opened it up and handed it over. The Queen read it.
‘Oh,’ she said, her voice crisp and icy. She turned it face down and placed it on the desk in front of her. ‘When did you get it?’