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?
‘How on earth would Eric Ferguson know about the Gentileschis?’ the Queen asked, with genuine interest.
It was Sir Simon’s turn to reply. ‘Ah. Well, it goes back to the family connection. He’d have heard it all from Sidney Smirke, who was running the Works Department at the time. Smirke was the person Mrs Harris had a relationship with after leaving Harvie. Given they were pals, it made me wonder whether Harvie fixed that too. Which he did, as it turns out. When that relationship went sour, she ended up making beds in Buckingham Palace. She probably felt bitter and vengeful about her treatment, even after all this time. No wonder Harvie was wary of what she might do or say.’
Difficult. Bitter. Vengeful. The Queen heard these words, nodded, and kept her thoughts to herself.
‘Anyway, what matters,’ Sir Simon continued, ‘is that Harvie had stolen four of your artworks and subsequently sold two of them, and if Mrs Harris chose to, she could easily incriminate him, even if she didn’t necessarily know the details of what he’d done. Hence, he asked Eric Ferguson to “keep her quiet”.’
‘And Mr Ferguson overreacted,’ the Queen said, ‘and decided to kill the poor woman?’
‘Exactly, ma’am. Given what we now know about him, he probably enjoyed it.’
‘It seems excessive.’
‘It was. But this was a man who stalked a secretary here for weeks, online and in person, to get her to leave.’
‘The timing was important.’ It was Strong who pointed this out. ‘Ferguson was in the middle of orchestrating his most daring move yet: the master-fraud embedded in the Reservicing Programme. Nothing must be allowed to draw attention to the Breakages Business – past, present or future. Still, to any normal person, a murder would seem, as you say, excessive. We wondered, ma’am, why Harvie said nothing when the body was discovered. He must have realised the death was highly suspicious.’
‘Precisely. Indeed I—Um, yes. I see what you mean,’ the Queen said, with a cough.
‘We have reason to believe Harvie didn’t know Ferguson’s true nature at the time, or he’d have done things differently. Afterwards, it was too late. Because not only did Ferguson know about the paintings, it turned out he also knew another dark secret of Mr Harvie’s.’
‘Dear me. More secrets?’
They told her about Daniel Blake, and it wasn’t difficult to look upset at the thought of the bike crash, because she was.
Strong explained, ‘Harvie probably got advice from one of his dodgy friends on how to nobble the brakes. Harvie liked bikes, but he was hardly a mechanic. From what we understand, he was pretty devastated by the death. They were friends. He intended the young man to be injured, perhaps with a broken bone or two. He was a fool. A murderous fool, as it turned out.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘There was a sort of Mexican stand-off,’ Strong explained. ‘That’s when—’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Oh, right. Well, Ferguson knew Harvie had effectively killed Daniel Blake, back in the day. Harvie strongly suspected Ferguson had killed Mrs Harris. But Harvie also realised, ma’am, that Ferguson wouldn’t let him live indefinitely, with the knowledge he had. He decided to kill the man before he became his next victim.’
‘You’re sure it was Sholto?’
‘Yes, ma’am. The last call to Ferguson came from a landline at the Travellers Club, where Harvie regularly stayed when he was in London. We established he had been at the club the night of the murder, which was also the night of the pensioners’ party at the Palace. He was our man, no doubt about it. He wasn’t as clever or as thorough as Ferguson. Afterwards, he hid the gun in a Chinese vase in the cellars. Assumed we wouldn’t look there, I suppose. It was practically the first place we tried.’
‘How, might I ask,’ the Queen said, ‘did he smuggle a gun into the Palace in the first place?’
The men all looked helpless. It was collectively their job to protect the Sovereign and this was a good question.
‘We don’t tend to frisk your old servants, ma’am,’ Sir James admitted. ‘Perhaps we should. We ask for photo ID, of course, and we had a bag search at the door for the party, but Sir Simon suspects that Harvie had hidden the pistol against his back, under a silk cummerbund that he was wearing.’
‘It was particularly wide and garish, ma’am,’ Sir Simon explained. ‘I remember noticing it later. Not the highest form of tailoring, for a man who was otherwise well dressed. The gun was a Colt .38 Special from the thirties. Small and powerful – the sort of thing you might choose if you’re not sure of your aim and want to stop someone at a short distance. DCI Strong here subsequently discovered that Harvie bought it as a deactivated antique and had it reactivated by one of his more disreputable friends. He had a lot of those, we now understand. It was another such person who must have sold him the fake passport he used to get to France.’
‘He was in France?’
‘That’s right. The French police found him in a hotel outside Paris yesterday.’
‘Goodness.’
The Queen looked genuinely fascinated. Sir Simon was relieved to talk more about this discovery, and less about those moments when killers had been allowed to stalk the Palace corridors uninterrupted, which was something the triumvirate and the police would rather put behind them.
‘He was in the middle of writing a letter, which was more of a confession, really.’
‘To what, exactly?’
‘To the killing of Ferguson. By then we were already pretty certain he’d done that anyway. But also to the fact that he felt indirectly responsible for the two other deaths.’
‘Three deaths,’ the Queen mused. ‘And to think I sent Rozie straight into his lair.’
‘Hardly a lair, ma’am,’ Sir Simon reassured her. ‘Harvie was obviously taken with Rozie. He was very keen to see her that night at the party. I believe he had just killed Ferguson at the time, and was tired and emotional—’
‘You mean drunk.’
‘Very drunk, actually. It must have been quite a mental and physical job to deal with the body in the cellars.’
‘Wasn’t he covered in blood?’ the Queen asked, suddenly wondering.
Sir Simon smiled. ‘It seems he had the presence of mind to put on a warehouse coat he must have found down there. I saw it stashed with the body, but stupidly assumed it belonged to Ferguson. Anyway, it looks as though he cleaned off, went back upstairs, drowned his sorrows thoroughly at the bar and decided in a maudlin fug that he wanted to assure Rozie of his affection. In fact, he left her a painting, ma’am. He mentioned it in his letter. He said it was one she had admired when she visited.’
‘I don’t understand. You say he left Rozie a picture?’ The Queen looked from one man to the other.
DCI Strong leaned forward. They had decided to leave this information until last, because of its upsetting nature.
‘I’m sorry to tell you, ma’am, that when the French police found Harvie yesterday, he was dead.’
‘Oh,’ she muttered quietly, resting a hand on the back of the corgi curled up beside her. ‘I see.’
‘He’d taken a bunch of pills in a little hotel in the suburbs. It’s the kind of place they don’t clean as often as they might. They didn’t find him for two days.’