A Three Dog Problem

There was a little room in the far left-hand corner: a small cube carved out by breeze blocks in the larger space. Rozie walked over to it, calling out, ‘Is anyone there?’ She realised her voice was sharper than usual. But there was no reply. The door opened at the push of the handle. Inside was a desk and shelving, stacked with miscellaneous boxes, battered tins of paint and neatly organised containers for screws and nails. It smelled faintly of sandalwood and musk. She searched the desk, where an old mug housed various biros, pencils and rulers. There was a pad of lined yellow paper next to it. Rozie tried out a couple of the pens, which were useless and dry. A rusty wastepaper bin contained a couple of screwed-up sheets of yellow paper. Rozie put them on the desk and smoothed them out. They were written on in pencil – numbers and letters jotted in neat little rows that made no obvious sense. She got out her phone and took pictures, then she re-crumpled the papers and put them back where she’d found them. Notebooks containing similar markings were scattered inside a drawer.

A nearby metal door led to another storage room. This one was long and thin, with an arched, low ceiling and walls lined with glazed tiles, like an old-fashioned Underground station. Rozie sensed that it marked the start of the tunnels. Its shelves held, among other things, at least two dozen hatboxes, several coils of thick rope, three child-size racing cars and four lifesaver rings. When she looked more closely, she saw the rings were marked HMY Britannia. There was another metal door at the end, partly obscured by two old-fashioned Harry Potter-style trunks and a tea chest. Rozie shifted the tea chest to one side and the trunks to the other. One of these was heavier than the other and, out of curiosity, she lifted the lid to find three magnificent blue and white Chinese vases, each half a metre high, nestled neatly among straw.

The metal door behind them opened with a shove. If there had once been a sign on it to warn against going further, there wasn’t now. Beyond was a red-brick tunnel about five metres long and, at the end, yet another door. This one was different: lower, much older, set into a heavy frame. By now she must be under Constitution Hill, Rozie judged, turning on her torch. This was presumably where Prince Philip had required the staff to shut off the tunnels. The air was unusually still, resulting in a quiet that heightened her senses. She was aware of every buzz and flicker in the lights behind her, and the woody, masculine scent that lingered alongside the smell of damp and dirt.

The door itself was worthy of a museum: thick timber, mottled with age and studded with hefty metal bars to hold its hinges. There was a keyhole in an ancient plate below a rusty handle, but no sign of a key. Instead, the door was locked with a more modern hasp, hinged at the wall and held in place with a heavy padlock that fed through a staple attached to a steel plate. Rozie thought she might as well take a photo to show the Boss. She put down the torch, retrieved her phone from a jacket pocket and held it in place with the flash switched on, ready to press the button. But as she pulled the padlock towards her to get a decent picture, she found the lock swinging towards her, almost causing her to lose her balance.

The steel plate that held the staple was not attached to the door at all. Left flat, the mechanism looked sturdy, but if pulled it simply came away at the hinge, padlock and all, leaving the door unlocked. All Rozie had to do was tug on the rusty handle and the whole door swung aside.

The Queen’s instructions had been clear and so was Rozie’s army training: you took instruction from senior officers and did exactly what you were told.

But she was a battle-hardened veteran and every muscle and sinew in her body strained to go forward, into the dark. If you went forward, you made progress. Stop now, and you could only report a problem. The big question was always, ‘Who else do you put at risk?’ But there was no one else to worry about. And Rozie was perfectly capable of looking after herself.

‘Sorry, ma’am,’ she muttered, picking up the torch and moving on.

The walls around her were brick-lined, wide and low. The ground was laid with uneven stone, patched with planks of wood over bare earth left by missing slabs. The duckboards were marked with irregular dark lines, which she judged to be tyre marks – from a wheelbarrow, perhaps? They looked freshly swept: free from the mud and grime she would have expected after sixty years.

Beside them, the torchlight picked out a steady stream of litter. There was an abandoned beanie, a mouldy leather glove, a snack wrapper from a brand she didn’t recognise. What were Taz bars? Regardless, she was fairly sure they didn’t have them in the fifties, or whenever Prince Philip had made his visit. Fairly sure none of this was supposed to be here at all.

By now she thought she must be under Green Park. The tunnel snaked along with occasional bends, making it impossible to see very far, but St James’s Palace must be ahead and slightly to the right. It was one of the few times in her life Rozie wished she wasn’t just shy of six foot tall. These Tudor guys must have been really short, or maybe they used children. Either way, Prince Philip’s plan would never have worked. She couldn’t see Prince William or Prince Harry crouching down like this to visit secret girlfriends. They’d need decent physio if they did. And the idea of an old-fashioned royal like Princess Margaret being down here in the cold and dark, for a quarter of a mile, to see her sister? No.