by SJ Bennett
‘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”.’
‘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 imp
ortant.’ 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.’
The Queen nodded slowly. ‘So that’s why you called his letter a confession. The words of a dying man.’
‘Exactly, ma’am. They were addressed to a woman called Lisa. We don’t know who she is yet, but we’re making en-quiries. It seems the Private Secretary’s quick thinking rather caught up with the man,’ Strong added. ‘Harvie mentioned that he’d hoped it would be months before anyone looked in that trunk in the cellars, and by then it would be difficult to know exactly when Ferguson died. When he heard on the news how fast Sir Simon here found the body, he knew the game was up.’
‘What did he say to Lisa, exactly?’ the Queen wanted to know.
‘Oh, nothing too specific. Only that he was sorry. Not for killing Ferguson, which he seemed quite pleased about, but for Blake, and for Mrs Harris, and for introducing Sidney Smirke to the Palace in the first place. We didn’t know this, but apparently it was Harvie who originally recommended him. Another dodgy, plausible friend from his art school days.’
‘Was he sorry about the pictures?’
‘He didn’t mention those in his letter,’ Strong said. ‘I think it was more the lives that mattered to him.’
‘Well, at least there’s that. And the Breakages Business . . . have we finally put an end to it?’
By ‘we’ the Queen meant ‘you’, and Sir James and Sir Simon knew that.
‘We have indeed,’ Sir James said firmly. ‘Ferguson was good at deleting things from his phone, but he kept a detailed record of the frauds on his computer. He assumed it was hack-proof, but thanks to the whizz-kid at the NCA, it took less than a day to give up all its secrets. Including Ferguson’s associates inside the Palace and out.’
‘We’ve arrested most of ’em,’ the chief superintendent announced, buttons twinkling. ‘Some we’re just keeping an eye on. They might lead us to more syndicates we’ve got an interest in. And meanwhile the media can feast on the fact that yes, there might have been two bodies, but with Sir Simon’s help we solved the mystery of both of them in record time. All in all, it’s been an excellent team effort, I’d say.’
On that note, the four men sat back, satisfied.
‘Well, I must congratulat
e you all,’ the Queen said. ‘This has been most informative.’
‘All in a day’s work,’ Sir Simon said with a grin.
‘Oh, absolutely,’ the Queen agreed, rising. ‘It’s just what I’d have expected. Very well done.’
If he did that hand flap again, she thought, he might get RSI.
Chapter 48
A
s they left, the Queen asked Rozie to stay behind.
They stood together quietly, both reflecting that this was the very spot where they had stared at each other, first truly considering that Mrs Harris’s death might be unnatural.
‘You did well,’ the Queen said.
‘Shall we let them go on thinking that she was blackmailing Sholto, and that’s what started everything?’ Rozie asked.
‘I think we should. It’s unfair on her, I know. She didn’t understand the power she had to bring Sholto down. However, it’s easier that way. It keeps you out of it, and I don’t want to complicate things for them unnecessarily.’
Rozie nodded. ‘Ma’am. But what if DCI Strong realises Eric targeted me before I helped out Sir James with the spreadsheets?’
‘I imagine he has realised,’ the Queen said. ‘But it would be hard for him to prove the cause. Easier, I think, for him not to probe too far. After all, the murders are solved and both murderers are dead.’
‘Yes.’ Rozie nodded again. She seemed very muted, and it occurred to the Queen that she must be thinking that she was personally responsible for all of this. Responsible, because she had alerted Eric Ferguson to danger by asking about a painting that went missing in 1986, and whose provenance she would diligently track. Eric had been right to fear that painting. It was the one mistake – the one act of reckless greed, without planning or thought for the consequences – that the Breakages Business had made. Rozie would have followed up with Cynthia Harris eventually. Even if the housekeeper didn’t yet realise how much she knew, they would have unravelled the thread all the way back to Sholto and Sidney Smirke and poor Daniel Blake, as they eventually did. But Rozie was wrong to take on this burden.