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?
‘Oh, surely not Mr Harvie?’ the Queen said. ‘But he was so charming!’
‘It pays never to be blinded by charm, ma’am,’ the Private Secretary said wisely, crossing one pinstripe-trousered leg over the other and giving her a sad little shake of the head. ‘I asked an old-timer if Smirke and Harvie had been friends, and he remembered that they were very pally. The thing is, I happened to see Harvie outside my office a few days before I found Ferguson’s body. He was actually looking for Rozie. She told me later who he was, and that it was something to do with your old painting, which they’d discussed, I gather. Young Rozie had nothing to do with all of this, I hasten to say.’
‘Thank goodness for that,’ the Queen said, with a nod to her APS, who glanced innocently up from her notes.
‘Although, to think, if it wasn’t for your little picture, ma’am, I might never have put two and two together.’
From two seats away, Strong gave the Queen a brief, inquisitive look, which she affected to ignore.
‘Goodness me. How lucky indeed. And how very sharp of you, Simon.’
‘Thank you, ma’am. Just doing my duty.’
‘And what were the two and two, exactly?’ she asked.
‘By then we were fairly sure Ferguson had killed Mrs Harris, and it seemed too coincidental that she had also known Mr Harvie, whom I had seen at the Palace on what was almost certainly the fateful night Ferguson died. It was just a feeling, ma’am. Hard to explain. Anyway, I told the chief inspector here and he agreed to visit Harvie in the Cotswolds and investigate. We still thought it was all about the Breakages Business, but then the police made a breakthrough.’
Strong took up the story again. ‘We found Harvie’s house locked up and he wasn’t answering his phone, so I got a search warrant. We didn’t find Harvie, but we did find something.’ He paused, because he had been looking forward to this bit. ‘Quite a momentous discovery, in fact, ma’am. Upstairs in the spare bedroom. Wrapped in blankets in a box under the bed.’
The Queen’s surprise was real. For a fraction of a second, her eyes met Rozie’s – whose expression read, I know! That very bed. The one she’d slept in. Like the Princess and the Pea. Except she hadn’t noticed anything.
‘Two original seventeenth-century paintings!’ Sir James announced happily, leaping in. ‘Of really quite exceptional quality, by an artist called Artemisia Gentileschi. Harvie had some good art on his walls, but nothing of that sort of value. We took them to the RCT to have them examined and it turns out they were part of a set of four, originally discovered in Hampton Court Palace.’
‘And how did this connect to Cynthia Harris?’
‘Ah.’ According to the cue cards, this was Sir Simon’s moment. The others duly turned to the Private Secretary.
‘She was the original expert on Gentileschi, ma’am,’ Sir Simon explained.
‘Can I just say,’ the chief superintendent interposed, his shiny buttons catching the light as he adjusted his pose to the benefit of his chiselled jaw, ‘that Sir Simon makes this sound quite straightforward, but it was really his extreme alertness and attention to detail that enabled us to put everything together so quickly. He’d be welcome on the force at any time.’ He hadn’t spoken for a while. He smiled and sat back.
‘Oh, please,’ Sir Simon begged. ‘Stop it. Pure luck. The Boss knows I’m just a simple sailor.’
‘I know nothing of the kind,’ the Queen said encouragingly. ‘Do go on.’
Sir Simon flapped his hand again. ‘All right, then. You see, a friend of Mrs Harris had recently written to you, using an illustrated card featuring Gentileschi, and I happened to find out – I think it was Rozie who told me – that Mrs Harris had once studied the artist.’
‘How fascinating.’
‘I asked the Surveyor about it. He’s very dependable, ma’am. And he found out that when she was working for Harvie in the eighties, part of her job was to call in on the old gentlemen and ladies who lived in grace and favour apartments at Hampton Court, and find out what goodies they might be sitting on. She used to cycle over there and see. In this case, the four portraits had been hanging in an unused dining room for decades. Mrs Harris would have instantly recognised the quality. She not only knew about these paintings . . . she discovered them.’
There was a suitably long pause.
‘Well,’ the Queen said. ‘How surprising.’
‘Astonishing, isn’t it? And Hampton Court Palace was a fire hazard in those days, so you might even say she saved them. But then they disappeared.’
The Queen looked appropriately curious, amazed and offended as the story of the theft and forgeries was explained to her, ending up with the disappointing copies she had seen. It was much as she had imagined, and the police had even managed to track down the niece of the forger himself.
‘Apparently he’d told her it was one of his greatest jobs,’ Sir James explained. ‘It was Harvie who hired him. They’d known each other since their art school days. The tricky thing was not to make the fakes too good. They had to look like contemporary copies. The forger said he imagined he was a bored countess in the court of Charles II, practising her oil technique.’
‘Harvie was known to hang out with a very louche set, ma’am,’ Strong added. ‘It was put down to youthful high spirits at the time, but apparently he never quite lost that attraction to danger.’
‘And to crime,’ the Queen pointed out.
‘Exactly, ma’am,’ Strong agreed. ‘He made around seventy thousand pounds from the sale of two of the original Gentileschis—’
‘My Gentileschis.’
‘Yes. And kept the other two. But seventy thousand was a small fortune back then. He used it as a down payment on his house. He married soon afterwards and liked to give the impression his money had come from his wife, but it didn’t. Her family always thought there was something dodgy about him.’
‘It seems everyone thought so,’ the Queen observed. ‘Except us.’
‘The one thing we don’t know,’ Strong admitted, ‘is why Mrs Harris should have reappeared in his life after thirty years. In fact, my first thought, when Sir Simon alerted us to his association with her, was that perhaps they had a love affair long ago and Harvie might have killed Ferguson to avenge her in some way. Then we discovered the Gentileschis and a very different story emerged. We suspect she may have been blackmailing him, possibly through Ferguson.’
‘Mmmm.’ The Queen glanced briefly again at Rozie, who was looking at her shoes.
‘We don’t know that for sure,’ Strong went on, ‘but we do know that at some point in July, Eric Ferguson and Harvie were in touch by phone. A subsequent WhatsApp message from Ferguson said “things were hotting up re 1986”. That was the year Harvie had the Gentileschis faked, ma’am. He had caused her to leave her job that summer, presumably so she wouldn’t be around to see that the paintings she had just discovered were not the same as the “copies” he later revealed. The message from Ferguson said “it was on video”. We don’t know, but perhaps this was something Mrs Harris had made as part of a blackmail campaign. We know how difficult she was. Anyway, that’s when Harvie replied with an instruction to “keep Cynthia quiet”.’