A Three Dog Problem

‘Of you?’

‘Partly.’

‘You can be rather frightening.’

‘Thank you, ma’am. I was trying. But he was more worried about something else. I didn’t scare him into saying anything useful. He was definitely lying to me, but I had nothing specific to accuse him of. I said he’d been overheard, but I couldn’t exactly say who by.’

‘Who did overhear him?’ MacLachlan asked.

‘We don’t need to talk about that right now,’ the Queen said briskly. ‘How irritating.’ She paused, thinking.

Rozie said, ‘So for now, we come back to Mick Clements.’ She was remembering the murderous look in the man’s eye when he found her in the cellars. He would have gone for her, she was fairly certain, if Eric Ferguson hadn’t pulled him back.

‘We do,’ the Queen said. ‘And he was one of the people who sent you on a wild goose chase in the summer, wasn’t he, Rozie?’

She nodded. ‘By sending me off to the old manager with dementia, yes.’

‘Because you had started pulling on a thread,’ the Queen continued. For a moment, it all made sense. But then it didn’t. At worst, Mrs Harris might have told Rozie about the crimes of the nineteen eighties – if she even knew, for which they had no proof – but surely Clements could have distanced himself from those? He might have tried to threaten her into silence, but to go to all the effort and risk of actually killing her? He was impulsive – Rozie had seen that. Was that all it took? Could he have got away with it if it was?

‘Are you all right, ma’am?’

MacLachlan was looking at her with some concern. She realised she had been staring at a spot in the distance without speaking for some time.

‘Perfectly fine, thank you.’ She felt close, but not quite there yet. She had a murderer in mind, and a victim. But they refused to meet. ‘It’s all deeply frustrating,’ she admitted.

‘We’ll work it out, ma’am. There’s the pensioners’ party in a couple of days. I don’t normally go, but I’ll pitch up this time and see what I can winkle out of the old-timers.’

‘Thank you, Billy. Of course, there’s always the possibility there was never a murder at all.’

‘I think we agree that’s unlikely,’ MacLachlan said, somewhat unreassuringly, as they tramped back to the boot room.

The Queen went off to get ready for her weekly audience with the Prime Minister. She gave herself seven days to prove to her own satisfaction that someone from Billy’s list could have, and indeed would have, wanted to silence Cynthia Harris enough to kill her that night. If she hadn’t worked it out by then, she would hand the whole thing over to Chief Inspector Strong, just as she had admonished the Master for not doing with his poison pen investigation.

The whole panoply of the press would descend upon them like a marauding horde. They would be besieged and no doubt accused of a cover-up. She sighed. Sometimes the punishment for doing the right thing could be daunting. But some things were too important to be left to amateurs, regardless of the consequences. She had indulged herself enough.