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?
Chapter 50
The maids and dressers had already started packing for Sandringham. Everyone was looking forward to a quiet Christmas. They all felt they needed it after the year they’d had.
With a couple of days to go, the Private Office received a package with an MOD stamp on it, addressed to the Queen. Rozie was the one to open it. It contained an over-bright painting of the royal yacht Britannia surrounded by little sailing ships, and a very apologetic note from the Second Sea Lord, asking forgiveness for the delay.
She took it straight to the Queen in her study.
‘I thought you might like to see this as soon as it arrived, ma’am.’
‘Oh, goodness. Thank you, Rozie.’
Rozie, sensing herself dismissed, left the Boss to it.
The Queen stood at her desk, staring at the little painting for a while. Rozie would probably want to share this moment, after everything they had been through, but the Queen wanted to be alone.
They had changed the frame. It was no longer the original gilt one, but a plain wooden border, presumably applied by that bastard mandarin in Whitehall who had stolen it from her, to disguise its provenance. Resting her fingertips either side of it she bent down carefully, almost gingerly, and examined the canvas through her bifocals, starting at the top. The Second Sea Lord had mentioned ‘restoration’. Indeed, the painting looked even brighter than she remembered it.
Would they be there? She hardly dared look.
She dragged her gaze first to the pennants waving between the masts, and then to the main deck. Her heart beat a little faster . . . But they were there. Those precious little flecks of oil paint, that had survived a theft and over fifty years.
What were they called? There was a name for them. She looked back at the handwritten message from the Second Sea Lord, which came attached to a typed note from the conservator. ‘. . . Relatively good condition. Unvarnished. Some light overpainting, assumed contemporary pentimenti by the artist . . .’
Pentimenti. That was it. It sounded like regret. A change of mind. The artist having a second go.
In fact, it had been Philip in a fury, about six months after the painting arrived.
‘You know that ghastly thing by the Australian that we haven’t worked out where to hang?’
‘The Britannia?’
‘Yes.’
‘I rather like it.’
‘I can’t stand the bloody thing. Did you see, he has no understanding of wind? All the sails on the little craft go that way, see? So the wind must be coming in hard from the other side or it makes no sense. But the pennants on Britannia are drooping as if there’s no wind at all. I don’t know how you bear it.’
‘I’m not a sailor. Or an artist. But you’re both. Why don’t you change them, if they bother you so much?’
‘I think I just might.’
And so he had. A happy afternoon spent at his study desk, with oil paints spread around him and brushes in a variety of pots. He had worked on the pennants until he was happy with them at last. She noticed little difference, but she had picked up that while he was at it, he had also added three tiny splodges of white on the deck that somehow, from a distance, very cleverly looked as if they were someone waving.
‘Is that me?’
‘Of course it’s you. Who else would it be?’
‘How lovely.’
His face had softened entirely. ‘You know, sometimes I go off fishing for the day, or whatever it is, and you’re waiting for me on deck when I get back, with your sunglasses on and your camera out, waving frantically.’
‘Hardly frantically.’
‘You are. You look so pleased to see me then. I rather look forward to that sight of your arm windmilling at me.’
And she had dipped her head to meet his, which was still smeared with blue and white, and the kiss had been full of recent happy memories on tour.
She always thought of that moment, and the other moments it brought back, whenever she saw the ‘ghastly little painting’, with its little added flecks, which she would know at a hundred paces anywhere.
It didn’t belong in Portsmouth – it belonged outside her bedroom, where she had arranged for it to be hung that day over fifty years ago. No doubt Philip would pass by and say, ‘I never did understand what you see in that thing,’ as he so often had in the years before it disappeared. He had forgotten, but he had put it there.
She saw herself. And the image of her sun-bronzed husband heading for her across the water, beaming. These were the memories that made the rest of it possible. What could be more precious than that?
Acknowledgements
Thank you, once again, to Queen Elizabeth II for remaining a constant source of inspiration, both literary and otherwise. And to the late Duke of Edinburgh for providing the Queen with a lifetime of support and encouragement, and these books with a favourite character.
Charlie Campbell continues to be the best agent in the business. I’m eternally grateful to Grainne Fox and the team at Fletcher & Company, Nicki Kennedy, Sam Edenborough and the team at ILA. I’m extremely lucky to have Ben Willis in the UK and David Highfill in the US as my editors. Their teams at Zaffre Books, William Morrow and HarperCollins have worked tirelessly to perfect and promote the series in the most challenging of times, so huge thanks to everyone who has pulled out all the stops.
For their generous friendship and help, thanks to Alice Young, Lucy Van Hove, Annie Maw, Michael Hallowes, Rupert Featherstone, Fran Lana, Oyinda Bamgbose, Lili Danniell, Abimbola Fashola, and those who prefer to remain anonymous. Any mistakes or deliberate deviations from fact in this story are entirely my own.
Thanks to the girls: the Place, the Sisterhood, the Masterminds and the Book Club, who are about so much more than reading good books together.
Thank you to my parents for a lifetime of stories, and to Emily, Sophie, Freddie and Tom, who still aren’t really sure which royal family member is which, but make our family my favourite place to be. And to Alex, my strength and stay, for everything.
About the Author
S. J. Bennett wrote several award-winning books for teenagers before turning to adult mysteries. She lives in London and has been a royal-watcher for years, but is keen to stress that these are works of fiction: the Queen, to the best of her knowledge, does not secretly solve crimes.
You can find her at SJBennettBooks.com for all things crime and royal, on Instagram @sophiabennett_writer and on Twitter @sophiabennett.
To receive Royal Correspondence about the Her Majesty the Queen Investigates series – including royal family trivia and more – sign up at bit.ly/SJBennett
The Windsor Knot
Hello!
Thank you for picking up A Three Dog Problem.
I hope you have had the opportunity to read The Windsor Knot – the first account of the Queen’s adventures as a detective in this series, though by no means her first outing as a secret sleuth, as later books will reveal. If you haven’t, don’t worry; I’d like to think you have a treat in store.
As I set out to write the series, my first thought was the wonderful array of settings for each book. Having described Her Majesty’s life at Windsor Castle, my next stop was Buckingham Palace, surely? And so A Three Dog Problem was born. The title comes from physics and from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As you may know, the ‘three-body problem’ is a feature of classical mechanics. I’m joking – I had no idea, did you? But anyway, it is. More to the point, whenever Sherlock Holmes has a very difficult case to solve, he has to smoke three pipes to do it and it becomes a ‘three pipe problem’. I loved this idea. And when the Queen has an exceptionally difficult case to consider, she needs to take three dogs for a walk in Buckingham Palace garden, hence ‘a three dog problem’. In this case they are two dorgis and a corgi, because I’m afraid to say the Queen was down to her last corgi in the autumn of 2016, when the book is set.