A Three Dog Problem

He was investigating those awful letters Cynthia had got – although why he was still bothering after she was dead, Helen wasn’t sure. She’d asked, but he’d just said it was private Household business and he was sure she’d understand. Which Helen did, better than most, because Cynthia had always been a stickler for the royal family’s privacy. She never let out a peep about what went on in those grand rooms behind the gates of Buckingham Palace. Only that the Queen was a ‘darling’ and Prince Philip ‘not as bad as you’d think’, and Prince Charles likewise, and Camilla was ‘hysterical’ – in a good way.

As for the rest, well, she rarely talked about her work, and nor did Helen, who’d been a translator for most of her life after her art career fell through, as most of them do, unless you’re lucky enough or savvy enough to marry someone who’ll bankroll you. They met once every couple of months on one of Cynthia’s days off and went to galleries or concert halls together and talked about art and music, mostly. London was marvellous for culture. Worth, absolutely worth, living in a dingy one-bed basement flat, always lightly dusted in diesel particles from the passing buses on Battersea Bridge Road, instead of somewhere light and airy with a garden. Who needed a garden when you could have Tate Britain practically on your doorstep? And the V & A, and the Royal Opera House?

They had talked about that hideous campaign against Cynthia at the Palace, and Helen had spent many a Sunday afternoon in cafés at different cultural attractions offering tea and sympathy. She’d told the policeman all about this, and about Cynthia’s strange, unsettled career, from art curator for the Royal Collection at St James’s, to the Works Department that dealt with all the London palaces, to her eventual role at Buckingham Palace, where she seemed so settled, and Helen had tried to be happy for her. Though it was hard.

It was something Helen had never told anyone, because, frankly, nobody had ever asked, but she’d always felt the light had gone out of Cynthia that summer when she lost her job at the Royal Collection and set herself up with that hideous, awful man who belittled her in public (Helen had seen it with her own eyes) and ignored her at work (Cynthia said so), and quite possibly hit her. Cynthia had never admitted to it, but Helen had seen the way she shrank into herself near any man of roughly his size and weight for years. Why do it? She’d been such a confident, free-spirited girl at art schooclass="underline" like Helen herself. But it was the year her very good friend Daniel had died in that horrific bike smash, and she was grieving and unbalanced. That must have been part of it. Helen had tried to make her apply for other jobs in the art world. She was so good at it, and the Baroque was her passion. But Cynthia just said she was ‘done for’. Her ‘name was mud’. ‘Nobody would look at her.’ It was never clear exactly what she’d done, but overnight she’d gone from being the department’s darling to persona non grata. It was almost as if they’d caught her stealing a work of art.