A Three Dog Problem

by SJ Bennett

  If you were to illustrate the problem, a graph that should predict a steady rise in some fairly low-level maintenance requirements suddenly took off two years down the line in an almost exponential curve. Thanks to Mary, the Keeper already knew roughly where to look in the database; Rozie had simply helped him pinpoint the mistake. Apparently, Sir James had asked various underlings to fix the issue several days ago, but they had merely assured him it was all ‘under control’. He had found this, he said, infuriating – given that it so obviously wasn’t.

  Anyway, armed with pages of printouts and a borrowed laptop, Rozie made her way to the property accounts department to get the problem fixed. It would have made sense for them to be in the South Wing, near Sir James himself, but it was in the nature of Buckingham Palace for the sensible thing to be completely different from what actually existed. For reasons nobody could remember, this particular team were buried in the basement, off a long corridor in the West Wing, opposite the kitchens. Rozie hurried down three flights of stairs, past the vast boiler room that fed the central heating, like something from an ocean liner, and on until she came to their unassuming office underground.

  To her surprise, it was empty, but there seemed to be a bit of a party going on in the staff kitchen next door. After the focused energy of everyone upstairs, the new atmosphere was a bit of a shock.

  ‘Is it someone’s birthday?’ she asked.

  Four heads turned to look at her. Four glasses of Prosecco paused mid-air. She felt the festive mood shift.

  ‘Er, sort of,’ the nearest man said, with a half-smile she couldn’t read. He was short and out of shape, Rozie saw, with a belly he could afford to lose. His suit was crumpled and his tie loosened. ‘Care to join us?’

  ‘I can’t, I’m afraid. I just need someone’s help with this.’

  She noticed that two of the men were Mick Clements and Eric Ferguson from the Operations Team, whom she had spoken to over the summer. Now, as then, Mick, the head, seemed sullen and hostile at the sight of her, while his younger colleague tipped his head to one side, as if examining her in a glass case.

  Mick put his Prosecco glass down with slow deliberation.

  ‘I guess I’ll be going, then.’

  As Mick brushed past her, she felt his body bristle with barely contained disgust. She couldn’t imagine what she had done to deserve it, and the others were hardly less hostile. Nobody invited her to go to their office, or offered to help. Rozie stood her ground and explained her problem, resting her open laptop on a kitchen counter. As the party atmosphere fizzled out, she felt a mixture of discomfort and annoyance. It wasn’t yet five thirty and upstairs the workday was still well under way; here, they seemed to think it was over. They were not remotely interested in her problem, though they were quick to dismiss her afternoon’s work.

  ‘I think you’ve missed the point a bit, miss.’

  The junior-looking accountant stuck his hands in his pockets and gave her a shrug. His colleague stared at the ground.

  ‘I don’t think I have. Can I ask who’s in charge?’

  The short man in the crumpled suit grunted something and reluctantly listened as she explained again what figures she needed. He shook his head and looked at her sadly.

  ‘Like Andy says, you’ve got into a bit of a muddle with this one, sweetheart. You’ve got your databases mixed up.’ He reached across her and tapped on the keyboard of the laptop, breathing noisily into her shoulder. ‘This line here doesn’t relate to that one there. Don’t worry, we can sort this out for you next week.’

  The air was thick and stale, and uncomfortably warm. Rozie stubbornly explained her calculations line by line, only gradually revealing – as they continued to shake their heads and contradict her – that she was as financially literate as they were, if not more so; that she was working on their boss’s most important project of the year, and that if they couldn’t help her in the next five minutes, she was going to have to report them for obstruction.

  She watched their dismay, resistance and eventual capitulation. They went back to their desks reluctantly to adjust their projections in line with her new figures, and she couldn’t get out of the office and their company fast enough.

  Eric Ferguson accompanied her. Tall and lanky, he’d been lounging in the doorway since his boss left and she’d almost forgotten he was there.

  ‘I’m going your way,’ he said. ‘Let me carry that laptop for you.’

  ‘I can manage,’ Rozie said.

  When they were out of earshot of the accountants, he hooted.

  ‘Phew! That was tough. I felt for you, Captain O, I really did.’

  ‘They could have been more helpful.’

  ‘Yeah, you could say that. I thought you went pretty easy on them. Mind you, they’d just had some bloody bad news.’

  ‘Had they? I thought they were celebrating.’

  ‘Commiserating. Drowning their sorrows. Pete – he’s the fat guy – he thought he was getting this big bonus today, but it just got cancelled.’

  Eric seemed to be waiting for a comment, so Rozie said, ‘Oh.’

  ‘He had the fizz anyway, so . . .’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Yeah. Bad timing.’

  They were back near the boiler room, big enough to power an aircraft carrier, which emitted a low, steady hum so powerful Rozie could feel it in her bones. She remembered something from her research today and nodded towards the noise.

  ‘They’ll be overhauling all of that before too long. I bet you can’t wait for the Reservicing.’

  Eric gave her his odd sideways stare for a moment, then his face melted into a grin. ‘Loads of work for us, you mean? We’ll be at it non-stop. Can’t wait though, yeah. Tippety-top.’

  With a nod, he indicated a nearby staircase and disappeared up it at a trot. Rozie shrugged to herself, thinking back to the accountants. That atmosphere had been weird. Only now did she fully take on board how unwelcome her presence had been.

  Was it one of them who had sent her the notes? she wondered. Was it personal? It was hard to see how or why: she’d never met them before. ‘Like some sort of Nubian queen’, Neil Hudson had said, as if he was being complimentary. Sod him. She would not suspect everyone she encountered. She would not let the pathetic little knife-doodler drive her out of the job she loved.

  But still. She picked up the pace and speed-walked back to the office with the new projections. Slightly out of breath, she accepted Sir James’s fulsome praise for ‘saving the afternoon’. Then she made her way to DCI Strong’s little incident cubbyhole on the floor above, to let him know of a couple more poison pen suspects to investigate.

  Chapter 28

  T

  he Queen fitted in one more meeting at the end of the day.

  After dinner, Billy MacLachlan was also shown to her private audience room. He looked around briefly, pleased to notice that almost nothing had changed in the time since he last saw it. A few photographs of grandchildren had now been joined by those of great-grandchildren. Prince Harry, meanwhile, had changed from the nervous teenager with the cheeky grin into a more confident young man, whose star quality shone out through the ginger beard.

  ‘It’s good to see you again, Billy,’ she said.

  ‘Likewise, Your Majesty.’

  She thanked him for his help at Windsor at Easter, and he refrained from thanking her for tasking him with this new job. It was better if your employers thought you were doing them the favour.

  ‘Did you find the curator?’ she asked, inviting him to sit down.

  Dogs came to sniff at his trousers, then settled at the feet of their mistress.

  ‘Not a curator, ma’am – a conservator,’ he said, sinking into the sofa cushions and making a mental note to brush the dog hairs off his trousers later. ‘They clean the paintings and reverse the ravages of time, but I’m sure you know that. His name was Daniel Blake, and he was hired by Sholto Harvie, the Deputy Surveyor, in 1982 to work for the Royal Collection.
He was the first full-time conservator they had – now there’s a whole studio of them. Anyway, Mr Harvie made the case for a full-time employee and Blake worked alongside him out of Stable Yard House.’

  The Queen pursed her lips, then shook her head. ‘I don’t remember him.’

  ‘No reason why you should. He was fresh out of the Courtauld. In his late twenties, with a degree in chemistry and another in the history of art. Harvie and he got on pretty well, from what my sources tell me. But you were right, ma’am – Blake had a terrible motorbike accident in 1986. It was in the summer, shortly after they’d discovered those Baroque paintings in Hampton Court Palace. He was heading out of town up the M1 to go and meet some friends. A climbing trip, something like that. The smash was pretty bad.’

  ‘And he recovered?’ the Queen asked. ‘Where is he now?’

  MacLachlan paused for a beat. ‘No, ma’am, he didn’t recover. I interviewed an uncle. Blake’s mother died five years after the smash and the uncle thinks it was the grief that did it. Blake had a refurbished Norton Commando bike, ma’am – his pride and joy, sounds like. Nice bikes, but notoriously unreliable. Crashed into by a lorry at a roundabout and was in a coma for several weeks before Mrs Blake had to make the decision to turn off the machines. The uncle I spoke to had helped him refurbish the bike and got a report from a garage afterwards – he wanted to know if it was something they’d done wrong or whatever. They said there was a loose bleed nipple. It’s a component in hydraulic brake systems, ma’am. It can happen. The front brake was leaking fluid and Daniel didn’t stand a chance. He skidded into that lorry and went right under it. It’s a miracle he survived at all. P’raps better if he hadn’t. For his mother. Making that decision. I don’t know . . .’

  The Queen looked dour. ‘Something no mother should have to do.’

  ‘Quite.’ MacLachlan was glad to change the subject slightly. ‘You mentioned there was a delay at that time about looking into the Hampton Court pictures, ma’am. The Artemisia Gentileschis.’ He had practised the pronunciation watching art videos on YouTube. Not what he’d have expected, it was sort-of Gentilesse-skis. ‘You were right about that too. They were all pretty cut up about Blake at the Royal Collection. He would have been the one to clean them up, so naturally it put the work back quite a bit.’ Artistic types, he thought, though he didn’t say it. If policemen downed tools every time somebody got knocked about, they’d never get anything done.

  The Queen nodded. ‘Those brakes. Is it possible to loosen the . . .?’

  ‘Bleed nipple, ma’am.’

  ‘Deliberately?’

  MacLachlan had of course considered this. ‘Yes, if you know what you’re doing. If I wanted to give a man on an old Norton Commando a nasty surprise and get away with it, that’s what I’d do.’

  ‘Thank you, Billy. Now, the pictures. I’m keen to know what happened afterwards. I have a dim memory of the copies going into storage, once it was agreed Artemisia didn’t paint them. And I’m sure . . .’ She leaned forward, absent-mindedly stroking the corgi’s ear as she considered. ‘. . . At least I think the Surveyor told me that two of the originals were later found elsewhere.’

  She was silent for a moment, lost in thought. The one time she had seen the canvases, soon after their discovery, they had been laid out in a conservation studio at St James’s Palace, two flat on a table and a couple of others propped in front of them, on the floor. Everyone had been very excited, Sholto most of all. They were portraits of women – more allegories, perhaps – very dirty and dingy, with the occasional flash of brilliance underneath the centuries of grime. She didn’t remember them precisely, only that the light and shadow on the faces was very clever, and the women were beautiful but also interesting, like real women, women she knew, people with complicated interior lives, caught in the moment. They had been quite lovely.

  Then there had been a long gap over the autumn when nothing had happened, and it was explained that the young conservator – Blake – had had his accident, so someone else had been called in to look at the Gentileschis and clean them up. Afterwards, when the experts came to examine them properly, it turned out they were copies after all, and not even particularly good ones, apart from the faces. She had been disappointed, but other things had demanded her attention. Of course! The trip to China. She was away for several weeks, working hard each day to make the tour a success.

  ‘I was aboard the royal yacht at the time,’ she muttered. ‘Very busy.’

  When she had come back, she was exhausted and the Gentileschis were a distant memory. Soon afterwards she was finalising the following year’s trip to Canada with the Foreign Secretary. Meanwhile, after a mix-up that was never fully addressed, she chose Cuneo’s sketch of the lake through the trees to fill the gap on the pale jade wall outside her bedroom, where once the vibrant, ‘ghastly’ oil painting of Britannia had been.

  ‘Ma’am?’ MacLachlan gently brought her back to the present. ‘D’you want me to look into the other “accident” while I’m at it? The one in the pool?’

  ‘No.’ She was firm. ‘That will be a job for the police if we come to it. The official police, I mean.’

  She still dreaded alerting Chief Inspector Strong to a murder at the Palace. Now quite possibly two. First, she needed to assure herself of a connection between them. That reminded her.

  ‘Did you find out where Sholto Harvie was the night Cynthia died?’

  ‘I did. Somewhere in the Adriatic Sea, between Split and Ravenna, with three hundred witnesses. He was an expert guest on a cruise ship called the Evening Star, talking about the art of Greece, Venice and everywhere in between. Nice work if you can get it.’

  ‘I imagine it must be.’

  MacLachlan looked as if he was about to say something, hesitated, then summoned up his courage and said it anyway. ‘You must miss her a lot, ma’am. Britannia. You sailed everywhere.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, simply.

  And the worst of it was, having taken her yacht away from her and made travel and official entertaining exponentially more difficult, Mr Blair later admitted it had all been quite unnecessary. Suddenly she was very tired. She thanked Billy again for his work so far and took herself to bed.

  Chapter 29

  T

  he weekend at Windsor was beastly. One of her great pleasures, after church on Sunday, was normally coffee with her cousin Margaret Rhodes, who lived in the Great Park. She was one of the only people left who had known one all one’s life. As a little girl, she had known one as Lilibet, and to this day she was one of the few people one could talk to with utter frankness about everything that was going on in the world. She was a year older, and to see her soldiering so magnificently on was always heartening. Except, this weekend it was clear she was unwell. When the Queen popped in to visit her, there was a frailty to Margaret that was distinctly worrying.

  Life without her cousin, the Queen reflected, would be a different life altogether. It would be a new age, and with Philip retiring to Norfolk soon, it would be lonely in a new way. She had lost her sister fourteen years ago, shortly followed by Mummy, and one by one, close family and friends from the early days had followed with dismal regularity. Even the dogs. Since she was seven, there had been corgis in her life, in ever-increasing numbers, and now, with Holly gone, there was only Willow. The Queen had already decided not to breed any more, because she knew she would not be around forever to look after them, and from a strictly practical point of view, they were a trip hazard, and it was beholden to the monarch not to break her neck if she could possibly avoid it.

  She would cope. She would move on, just as she always did. And perhaps she was being maudlin and her cousin would get better soon. But it was a cold, dank, November weekend and the mood in the country and elsewhere was increasingly rattled. Would the fissures in Europe and in America mend themselves easily, regardless of who was in power? The US elections were due to take place in two days and the media were obsessed. Philip might
joke about Facebook, but even the White House was ‘confident’ that Russia had tried to use it to influence the democratic process. It seemed as if the very foundations of democracy were being undermined in ways she hadn’t seen since the war, which was longer than many of her subjects’ lifetimes. Like everyone else, she felt they were all on the brink of something they didn’t fully understand, grasping around to hold onto whatever they believed in, praying that it would stand.

  Philip had started a picture. He had his oils out in the Octagon Room – which stank of turpentine – and he was putting together a decent landscape of Balmoral, based on some sketches he’d done in the summer. It was the garden, seen from inside the castle. She marvelled at his self-control to do something creative and retrospective, and not to sit glued to the BBC.

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said, standing over his shoulder.

  He grunted.

  ‘Balmoral?’

  ‘No. Timbuctoo.’ He had a recording of an old cricket match playing in the background, and she sensed she was distracting him.

  ‘Have you heard a weather forecast recently? I missed my ride this morning. Is it going to keep raining like this?’

  He turned round properly to face her. ‘No idea. Look, I’m sorry about Margaret. You’ll stop feeling such a misery guts if you go and find something useful to do.’

  He was probably right. She half-heartedly started a jigsaw of Dunfermline at the finishing post of the St Leger, but found herself pondering on the connections between Cynthia Harris and Sholto Harvie, and Mary van Renen, the secretary who had left, and Mrs Baxter, who was ‘difficult’, and Rozie, who had merely asked about a painting but wondered whether she might have inadvertently caused a murder. Daniel Blake was one part of the puzzle, but even if Sholto had caused his ‘accident’, he couldn’t have caused Cynthia’s from the middle of the Adriatic.

  The Breakages Business was another piece. The Queen wasn’t sure if it was just a distraction set up by Sholto, or whether it was something more. She wasn’t satisfied with Sir James’s cursory look into the matter. If she was going to be useful, she decided this was where to look next.