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?
Philip had started a picture. He had his oils out in the Octagon Room – which stank of turpentine – and he was putting together a decent landscape of Balmoral, based on some sketches he’d done in the summer. It was the garden, seen from inside the castle. She marvelled at his self-control to do something creative and retrospective, and not to sit glued to the BBC.
‘That’s nice,’ she said, standing over his shoulder.
He grunted.
‘Balmoral?’
‘No. Timbuctoo.’ He had a recording of an old cricket match playing in the background, and she sensed she was distracting him.
‘Have you heard a weather forecast recently? I missed my ride this morning. Is it going to keep raining like this?’
He turned round properly to face her. ‘No idea. Look, I’m sorry about Margaret. You’ll stop feeling such a misery guts if you go and find something useful to do.’
He was probably right. She half-heartedly started a jigsaw of Dunfermline at the finishing post of the St Leger, but found herself pondering on the connections between Cynthia Harris and Sholto Harvie, and Mary van Renen, the secretary who had left, and Mrs Baxter, who was ‘difficult’, and Rozie, who had merely asked about a painting but wondered whether she might have inadvertently caused a murder. Daniel Blake was one part of the puzzle, but even if Sholto had caused his ‘accident’, he couldn’t have caused Cynthia’s from the middle of the Adriatic.
The Breakages Business was another piece. The Queen wasn’t sure if it was just a distraction set up by Sholto, or whether it was something more. She wasn’t satisfied with Sir James’s cursory look into the matter. If she was going to be useful, she decided this was where to look next.
By Monday morning she felt much better, cheered by a good night’s sleep and a pleasant early ride in the park. She worked in the car on the way back to London and was ready to face the week with her normal vigour.
Rozie was in charge of the boxes today.
‘There is something I’d like you to do for me.’
Rozie brightened instantly. ‘Of course.’
‘It’s about the Breakages Business. I’ve been thinking about the tunnels under the Palace. You must have heard of them.’
‘I’ve heard rumours,’ Rozie said. ‘That there used to be a network connecting all the royal palaces in this area.’
‘Not “used to be”,’ the Queen corrected her. ‘Is. They were used to store lots of the more valuable furniture during the war, then rather forgotten about.’
It was hardly surprising. Papa had other things to think about, repairing the worst of the bomb damage, trying to make the place presentable again with everything rationed and much of the empire still cut off as trade routes slowly re-established themselves. It wasn’t until she and Philip had been living here for a while that the Duke had grabbed his equerry and gone on an exploratory adventure in the bowels of the Palace and beyond.
You’ll never believe what we’ve found, he’d said on his return, dirty and happy, covered in mud and dust, with wisps of cobweb in his hair. Two crates of china. German. Looks important. Some nineteenth-century wine. Fourteen Regency gilt chairs. Seven mouldy mattresses, a portrait of George III, four marble fireplaces and a family of Romanian refugees. At that, her eyes had widened. Ha! he’d said. He’d made the last bit up, but he was amused by her lack of surprise at the rest.
At the time, they had all been fascinated by the forgotten treasures, and Philip had explored the tunnels further to see where they went, hoping to set up a useful little route for staff and family to travel out of the public eye between Buckingham Palace and Clarence House, where Mummy and Margaret now lived. He eventually reported that while the tunnel was reasonably roomy under the Palace grounds, its offshoots became narrow, low and damp as they ran under Green Park towards St James’s Palace. Walls seeped with slime and some areas were quite impassable. Philip had closed them off, giving instructions that the better-built parts near the Palace be used for storage only.
The Queen summarised this for Rozie.
‘I believe there is a doorway of some sort that lies roughly under Constitution Hill. It cuts off the far section and it’s supposed to be firmly locked. When things are quiet, might you perhaps be able to check that it really isn’t being used?’ She phrased this carefully. It was a genuine request to Rozie, with an opt-out clause framed in her eyes. The far end of the tunnels was unsafe, after all, and she didn’t want Rozie to take any risks unwillingly.
In fact, Rozie looked so delighted at the idea that the Queen had to give her strict instructions not to venture beyond Philip’s locked doorway, should such a thing be possible. She took care not to break her own neck and preferred her APS to do the same.
‘And one other thing. I believe that Lavinia Hawthorne-Hopwood may know Sholto Harvie’s background.’
‘The sculptor who’s doing your portrait for the Royal Society?’
‘Exactly. I’m sure I remember her discussing a connection. You could perhaps ask her about him, privately. If you’d be so kind.’
Rozie nodded. ‘What sort of thing would you like to find out?’
‘I don’t know,’ the Queen said. ‘It might be nothing. But ask, and see what you find.’
Chapter 30
In the South Wing office of the ‘rollicking bollockings’, Air Vice-Marshal Mike Green had not particularly been enjoying the last four weeks. Normally he was in his element in the run-up to Christmas, organising lavish dinners and banquets for the cream of international society. But this year there had been the unfortunate death of the terrible housekeeper and the extra pressure of the Reservicing Programme and, worst of all, the jumped-up policeman, Strong – or Bogroll, as he was known in court circles – was ferreting around the Palace and basically telling him how to do his job.
It was the Master himself who had come up with this particular epithet. There was that TV ad from his childhood about loo paper: ‘soft, strong and very long’. Bogroll was certainly soft and meetings with him felt endless. It was in the tradition of Palace nicknames. Mike Green was well aware that he was ‘Crabmeat’ to his elders and betters. The army and navy had called the RAF ‘crabs’ for decades, so it was inevitable really. The Master took it in very good spirit and smiled indulgently whenever someone accidentally said it to his face.
He smiled to himself now because Bogroll had been defeated. He wasn’t the one to spot the clue that solved the whole problem of the poison pen campaign. He hadn’t conducted the crucial interview with the perpetrator. (Admittedly, the chief inspector was rather annoyed about that – but was it the Master’s fault if he had been away on a training course on the critical day?) He hadn’t obtained the signed confession. Strong hadn’t looked convinced by any of it when faced with the evidence, but that was typical of the smallness of the man: he just couldn’t accept when he’d been bested. A gracious ‘Congratulations’ would have been enough.
The Master was looking forward to his meeting with Her Majesty. He hadn’t seen her alone for a week, in which time much had happened. He trusted she would be delighted. She might also be just a little penitent that she hadn’t trusted him in the first place, though of course she wouldn’t show it, and he wouldn’t expect her to.