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?
‘On the nose, ma’am!’ he beamed. ‘Well then, you’re with me. I’ve been talking to a man by the name of Frank in Bethnal Green. He has an interesting tale to tell. My suggestion that a few Palace items might have been half-inched in years gone by came as no surprise to him.’
The Queen looked resigned. ‘I see. People can’t help themselves. Or rather, they can. Guests have stolen our loo rolls, you know. Quite prestigious ones. Guests, I mean. I’m not sure you can have prestigious loo rolls.’
‘They’ve stolen a lot more than that,’ MacLachlan said. ‘Of course, it’s nothing new. You know about William Fortnum in the eighteenth century?’
‘The man who started Fortnum & Mason? Who was a footman for Queen Anne?’
‘Yes, him.’
‘Indeed I do,’ she said, smiling at the name. ‘A very enterprising man. He started off selling half-used Palace candles to the ladies-in-waiting. You can see his point. The queen liked fresh ones to be lit each day and there were thousands. It must have seemed a pity to waste them.’
‘He was quite the salesman,’ MacLachlan agreed. ‘And it worked out OK.’ He was picturing the store that stood seven storeys high on a corner of Piccadilly, with its lavish windows and a musical clock his little granddaughter was very fond of. ‘The thing is, Fortnum wasn’t alone. The palaces have always produced their entrepreneurs, shall we say. Some more savoury than others. So . . . The Breakages Business. Sir James suggested there might have been a little racket going on in the eighties as a one-off thing. But I know it was still going in the nineteen nineties for sure, when a man called Theodore Vesty was running it, and there’s no reason it couldn’t have kept going after that. It’s all rumour – nothing you could bring charges for. As I understand it, it worked two ways. There was the simple version, which was just smuggling things out that wouldn’t be missed: old curtains that were being upgraded, a small proportion of the baby clothes that got sent every time someone got pregnant. Never a large proportion, ma’am – that was the thing. Nothing to raise eyebrows unduly. Nothing to make nervous underlings go to the authorities.’
‘Hmm.’ The Queen nodded grimly.
Rozie remembered the similar way Sholto Harvie had described the Breakages Business to her.
‘Palace records were duly adjusted,’ MacLachlan went on. ‘They fenced the goods through people like my mate Frank. But I also looked into that Whitehall mandarin you told me about at the MOD, the one with the corner office – Roger Fox, his name was. He was a procurement manager in the eighties and early nineties who took early retirement for his health. That was the official story, but unofficially they caught him with his hand in the cookie jar. He was a crook through and through, basically. He may well have helped them out with finding willing buyers, no questions asked. He knew Vesty and, more to the point, Vesty’s predecessor, Sidney Smirke, was his brother-in-law.’
‘What?’ The Queen stopped in her tracks.
‘I thought you might be interested, ma’am. A nice little family business. Not hard to imagine your little picture going walkies from his storerooms to Fox’s office, if it wasn’t properly labelled during the refurbishment. The thing is, if it was usually hanging outside your bedroom, in your private apartments, I’m guessing most of the men in the Works Department wouldn’t have seen it there so it wouldn’t ring any bells. They must have assumed it was just general decoration and fair game. So it wasn’t handed over to the Royal Collection and was miraculously “lost”. That was the way they usually worked it, but only with things that didn’t matter. That time they made a mistake.’
‘Cynthia Harris would have known about it,’ the Queen said.
‘Even if she was with Sidney at the time, I doubt she was in on it. This was very much all the queen’s men, ma’am. Sidney didn’t tolerate women and she left soon after. But she might have guessed what must have happened if Rozie had had the chance to ask her. And it wasn’t just you being defrauded, ma’am,’ MacLachlan went on. ‘Suppliers were, too. In a different scam, they were forced to resupply goods that were delivered but never officially received. It’s hard to argue with Buckingham Palace. I mean, it can be done, but they’d have picked on small suppliers who wouldn’t dare.’
‘They used my name to threaten and defraud people?’
‘Er, yes, pretty much. It took a fine network to pull it off and I’m guessing that when they didn’t have everyone in place, they didn’t run it. You need two or three people who are responsible for taking in deliveries and signing them off. At least one of them has to be fairly high up. Another needs to be fairly junior, so it looks normal for him to be carting stuff down to the cellars, where the tunnel starts, so it can be spirited away. And obviously you need someone at St James’s Palace to receive the goods and get them out. Smuggling stuff in to the palaces would be pretty tough with all the security checks. Smuggling out? A child could do it, as long as it wouldn’t be missed.’
‘But what about receipts and invoices?’ Rozie asked. ‘There would be a paperwork trail. Someone in Finance would notice.’
‘Which is why you need accomplices there too. You pay them off. They look away. If you poke about a bit, I’m told there’s been an odd history of managers in the accounting team that looks after the property side over the last few years. They come and go. Some leave after hardly any time. I’m guessing the honest ones are put under pressure to move on. Maybe they’re accused of something, or their lives are made difficult.’
‘Constructive dismissal . . .’ the Queen said thoughtfully.
‘That’s it, ma’am. You keep the ones you can manipulate, shift the ones you can’t. Theo Vesty was a popular man in his day. He could get someone in with a good word, I imagine, and get them out again just as easy.’
‘Was it an accountant who killed Mrs Harris?’ the Queen wondered aloud. One never thought of accountants as being murderous types. Perhaps one should.
Rozie was thinking furiously. ‘I was down there! In their office, the day we finalised the Reservicing Programme. That’s the team you’re talking about, Billy. There are four of them, but only two were there at the time, along with Mick Clements and his sidekick from Operations. They were celebrating and I ruined it. I was asking about some of the assumptions built into the financing model and—’
She looked from one face to the other. Not everyone found Excel spreadsheet modelling as compelling as she did.
‘Sorry. Carry on, Billy. But I know who you mean. I think they thought they’d got away with something.’
‘And you were announcing they hadn’t?’ MacLachlan asked.
‘Without meaning to.’
‘I bet their little scam was worth thousands, or would have been.’
‘Ultimately, millions. And it was Mary van Renen who spotted it first. Perhaps they were onto her. It would certainly be enough to give them a motive to keep Cynthia quiet, if she had the slightest suspicion.’
MacLachlan nodded. ‘Worth checking where they were the night she died. Do accountants ever sleep in the Palace?’
‘I can’t imagine why they would,’ the Queen remarked.
‘I’d look into it myself,’ he began. ‘Security keep a record. But I don’t want to stick my head above the parapet, ma’am.’
She nodded in agreement. ‘Thanks for your discretion, Billy. I’d rather you stayed out of this. I know Chief Inspector Strong made a list of overnight guests that night. It’s in the file, isn’t it, Rozie?’
‘It is,’ Rozie confirmed.
‘There are a couple of porters you might want to check too,’ MacLachlan added to Rozie. ‘I’ll give you their names. I can’t see them being criminal masterminds, but they’ve been spending more lavishly than their pay packets suggest. Watches, phones, the odd new car . . .’