A Three Dog Problem

‘And he recovered?’ the Queen asked. ‘Where is he now?’

MacLachlan paused for a beat. ‘No, ma’am, he didn’t recover. I interviewed an uncle. Blake’s mother died five years after the smash and the uncle thinks it was the grief that did it. Blake had a refurbished Norton Commando bike, ma’am – his pride and joy, sounds like. Nice bikes, but notoriously unreliable. Crashed into by a lorry at a roundabout and was in a coma for several weeks before Mrs Blake had to make the decision to turn off the machines. The uncle I spoke to had helped him refurbish the bike and got a report from a garage afterwards – he wanted to know if it was something they’d done wrong or whatever. They said there was a loose bleed nipple. It’s a component in hydraulic brake systems, ma’am. It can happen. The front brake was leaking fluid and Daniel didn’t stand a chance. He skidded into that lorry and went right under it. It’s a miracle he survived at all. P’raps better if he hadn’t. For his mother. Making that decision. I don’t know . . .’

The Queen looked dour. ‘Something no mother should have to do.’

‘Quite.’ MacLachlan was glad to change the subject slightly. ‘You mentioned there was a delay at that time about looking into the Hampton Court pictures, ma’am. The Artemisia Gentileschis.’ He had practised the pronunciation watching art videos on YouTube. Not what he’d have expected, it was sort-of Gentilesse-skis. ‘You were right about that too. They were all pretty cut up about Blake at the Royal Collection. He would have been the one to clean them up, so naturally it put the work back quite a bit.’ Artistic types, he thought, though he didn’t say it. If policemen downed tools every time somebody got knocked about, they’d never get anything done.

The Queen nodded. ‘Those brakes. Is it possible to loosen the . . .?’

‘Bleed nipple, ma’am.’

‘Deliberately?’

MacLachlan had of course considered this. ‘Yes, if you know what you’re doing. If I wanted to give a man on an old Norton Commando a nasty surprise and get away with it, that’s what I’d do.’

‘Thank you, Billy. Now, the pictures. I’m keen to know what happened afterwards. I have a dim memory of the copies going into storage, once it was agreed Artemisia didn’t paint them. And I’m sure . . .’ She leaned forward, absent-mindedly stroking the corgi’s ear as she considered. ‘. . . At least I think the Surveyor told me that two of the originals were later found elsewhere.’

She was silent for a moment, lost in thought. The one time she had seen the canvases, soon after their discovery, they had been laid out in a conservation studio at St James’s Palace, two flat on a table and a couple of others propped in front of them, on the floor. Everyone had been very excited, Sholto most of all. They were portraits of women – more allegories, perhaps – very dirty and dingy, with the occasional flash of brilliance underneath the centuries of grime. She didn’t remember them precisely, only that the light and shadow on the faces was very clever, and the women were beautiful but also interesting, like real women, women she knew, people with complicated interior lives, caught in the moment. They had been quite lovely.