A Three Dog Problem

by SJ Bennett

Also by S. J. Bennett in the Her Majesty the Queen Investigates series

  The Windsor Knot

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  Keep reading for a letter from the author . . .

  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.

  What happened that autumn? These books set their mysteries among the real-life meetings and musings of a busy monarch. Surely, after her 90th birthday celebrations, I thought, she had a bit of quiet time? But no. It was the season of the fallout from the Brexit referendum, the US presidential elections, and the launch of a major programme to stop the Palace from falling apart. Would the Queen and Rozie have time to solve a couple of murders in her own London home? Reader, you will have to dip into these pages to find out if they did.

  If you would like to know more about the real-life inspirations for this book, along with snippets from my research about the Royal Family, then do visit bit.ly/SJBennett where you can sign up to receive Royal Correspondence about the series. It only takes a few moments to sign up, there are no catches or costs.

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  And if you would like to get involved in a wider conversation about my books, please review A Three Dog Problem on Amazon, on Goodreads, on any other e-store, on your own blog and social media accounts, or talk about it with friends, family or reader groups!

  Thank you again for reading this book, and I hope you enjoy the other books to come.

  With best wishes,

  S. J. Bennett

  Keep reading for an exclusive extract from the next mystery in the Her Majesty The Queen Investigates series . . .

  Coming November 2022

  Available to preorder now

  Prologue

  DECEMBER 2016

  T

  he girl on the beach emerged into the light and stared out across the mudflats at the horizon. She had been checking the hides at the end of the path to the wildlife reserve at Snettisham, to see how they had weathered the night’s heavy storm. By day, they were home to birdwatchers who came from miles around to observe the geese and gulls and waders. By night, the huts were an occasional refuge from the cold sea breeze for beers and . . . more intimate activities. The last big storm surge had smashed up some of the hides and carried them into the lagoons beyond. This time, she mused, the little piggies at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had built their home out of wood, not straw. The wind had taken the door off the furthest structure and piled the inside with shingle, but that was all.

  Back outside, she studied the skyline. One of the things she loved about this place was that here, at the edge of East Anglia, on the eastern-most coast of the United Kingdom, the coast stubbornly faced due west. It looked out onto the Wash, which formed a rectangular bite out of the coastline between Norfolk and Lincolnshire, where various rivers ran into the North Sea. No pale pink sunrise here. Instead, the sun had risen above the lagoons at her back. Ahead, a bank of cloud sat low and heavy, but the watery light gave the vast grey sky a pale gold glow that was mirrored in the mudflats, so that it was hard to tell where the earth ended and the air began.

  Not far from the lagoons, a little further along the shore to her left, lay the marshy fringes of the Sandringham estate. Normally the Queen was there by now, with Christmas so close, but Ivy hadn’t heard of her arrival yet, which was strange. The Queen, like the sunrise and the tides, was generally a reliable way of marking time.

  She glanced upwards, where a trailing skein of pink-footed geese flew in arrowhead formation, home from the sea. Higher still, and closer, a hen harrier circled in the air. There was a brutal, brooding quality to Snettisham Beach. The concrete pathway at her feet, and the skeletal wooden structures jutting out into the mudflats beyond the shingle, were relics of her great-grandfather’s war. Shingle mining for airbase runways had created the lagoons, where ducks and geese and waders now gathered in their thousands, filling the air with their hoots and honks and quacks. The gulls had deserted the land for decades, her father said, after the constant bombardment of artillery practice out to sea. Their return was a triumph of nature. And goodness knew, Nature needed Her little triumphs. She was up against so much.

  Most of the birds themselves were out of sight, but they’d been busy. The vast mudflats ahead were the scene of a recent massacre, pitted with thousands upon thousands of footprints of all sizes, where goldeneyes and sandpipers had landed once the tide receded to feast on the creatures who lived in the sand. Suddenly, a black bundle of fur caught the girl’s eye as it raced from right to left across the mud. She recognised it: a collie-cocker cross from a litter in the village last year who belonged to someone she didn’t consider a friend. With no sign of its owner, the puppy sped towards the nearest wooden structure, its attention caught by something bobbing in the sky-coloured seawater that eddied around the nearest rotten post.

  The storm had littered the area with all sorts of detritus, natural and man-made. Dead fish were dumped with plastic bottles and dense, bright tangles of fraying fishing nets. She thought of jellyfish. They washed up here too. The stupid young dog could easily try to eat one and get stung and poisoned in the process.

  ‘Hey!’ she shouted. The puppy ignored her. ‘Come here!’

  She began to run. Arms pumping, she hurtled across the scrubby band of lichen and samphire that led down to the shingle. Now she was on the mudflats too, the subterranean water seeping into each footprint left by her Doc Martens in the sand.

  ‘Stop that, you idiot!’

  The puppy was worrying at an amorphous, soggy shape. He turned to look at her just as she grabbed at his collar. She yanked him away.

  The floating object was a plastic bag: an old supermarket one, stretched and torn, its handles knotted, with two pale tentacles poking through. Grabbing a stick that floated nearby, she used the tip to lift it out of the puppy’s reach and looked nervously inside. Not a jellyfish, no: some other sea creature, pale and bloated, wrapped in seaweed. She intended to take the bag back with her for disposal later, but as she walked back towards the beach, the puppy straining against his collar at her feet, the contents slithered through a rip and plopped onto the damp, dark sand.

  The girl assumed at first that it was a mutant, pale-coloured starfish, but on closer inspection, moving the seaweed aside with her stick, she realised it
was something different. She marvelled for a moment at how almost-human it looked, with those tentacles like fingers at one end. Then she saw a glint of gold. Somehow one of the tentacles had got caught up in something metal, round and shiny. She peered closer and counted the baggy, waxy ‘tentacles’: one, two, three, four, five. The golden glint came from a ring on the little finger. The ‘tentacles’ had peeling human fingernails.

  She dropped the broken bag and screamed fit to fill the sky.

  Chapter One

  T

  he Queen felt absolutely dreadful in body and spirit. She regarded Sir Simon Holcroft’s retreating back with a mixture of regret and hopeless fury, then retrieved a fresh handkerchief from the open handbag beside her study desk to wipe her streaming nose.

  The doctor is adamant . . . A train journey is out of the question . . . The Duke should not be travelling at all . . .

  If her headache had not been pounding quite so forcefully, she would have found the right words to persuade her Private Secretary of the simple fact that one always took the train. The journey from London to King’s Lynn had been booked for months. The station master and his team would be expecting her in four and a half hours, and would have polished every bit of brass, swept every square inch of platform and no doubt had their uniforms dry cleaned to look their best for the occasion. One didn’t throw all one’s plans in the air over a sniffle. If no bones were broken, if no close family had recently died, one soldiered on.

  But her headache had pounded. Her little speech had been marred by a severe bout of coughing. Philip had not been there to back her up because he was tucked up in bed, as he had been all yesterday. He had no doubt caught the infernal bug from one of the great-grandchildren at the pre-Christmas party they had recently thrown at Buckingham Palace for the wider family. ‘Little petri dishes’, he called them. It wasn’t their fault, of course, but they inevitably caught everything going at nursery school and prep school, and passed it around like pudgy-cheeked biological weapons. Which young family should she blame? They had all seemed perfectly healthy at the time.

  She picked up the telephone on her study desk and asked the switchboard to put her through to the Duke.

  He was awake, but groggy.

  ‘What? Speak up, woman! You sound as though you’re at the bottom of a lake.’

  ‘I said . . .’ – she paused to blow her nose – ‘that Simon says we must fly to Sandringham tomorrow instead of taking the train today.’ She left out the bit where her Private Secretary had suggested Philip should remain at the Palace full stop.

  ‘In the helicopter?’ he barked.

  ‘We can hardly use a 747.’ Her head hurt and she was feeling tetchy.

  ‘In the navy we were banned . . .’ wheeze ‘. . . from flying with a cold. Bloody dangerous.’

  ‘You won’t be piloting the flight.’

  ‘If it bursts my eardrums you can personally blame Simon from me. Bloody fool. Doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’

  The Queen refrained from pointing out that Sir Simon was an ex-naval helicopter pilot. The GP who had advised him was renowned for his sound medical opinion. He had his reasons for counselling in favour of a quick journey by air instead of a long one by rail. Philip was ninety-five – hard to believe, but true. He shouldn’t really be out of bed at all, with his raging temperature. Oh, what a year this had been, and what a fitting end to it. Despite her delightful birthday celebrations in the spring, she would be glad to see the back of 2016.

  ‘The decision is made, I’m afraid. We’ll fly tomorrow.’

  She pretended she didn’t hear Philip’s wheezy in-breath before what would no doubt be a catalogue of complaints, and put the phone down. Christmas was fast approaching and she just wanted to be quietly tucked up in the familiar rural comfort of Sandringham, and to be able to focus on her paperwork without it swimming in front of her eyes.

  For the last three months the Queen had played host to presidents and politicians. She had been a greeter of ambassadors, a pinner-on of medals, a patron of charities, mostly at Buckingham Palace, the place she thought of as the gilded office block on the roundabout. Now Sandringham drew her with its wide-open spaces and enfolding pines, its sea breezes, vast English skies and freewheeling birds. She had been dreaming of it for days.

  The helicopter whisked the royal couple, blankets on their knees, past Cambridge, past the magnificent medieval towers of Ely Cathedral, the ‘ship of the fens’, and on, north-eastwards towards King’s Lynn. Here at last was Norfolk, where farmland was patched with pine woods, with paddocks and flint cottages. Below them, briefly, was the shell-pink Regency villa at Abbotsgate, where a herd of deer ambled slowly across the lawn. Next came the stubbly, expansive fields of the Muncaster Estate, whose furthest reaches lay a mile or two from one of the Sandringham farms, and then at last the fields, dykes and villages of Sandringham itself.

  She spotted a glint of seawater in the distant Wash and two minutes later Sandringham House appeared behind a ridge of pines, with its lakes and walled garden, and its sweeping lawn, amply big enough for the helicopter to land.

  Sandringham was Christmas. Her father had spent it here, and his father before him, and his father before him. When the children were small it had been easier to go to Windsor for a while, but her own childhood Christmases were Norfolk ones.

  The house was a Victorian architect’s red-brick, beturreted idea of what a Jacobean house should be, and people who cared a lot about architecture were generally appalled by it, but the Queen didn’t care. Over the years, the family had enlarged the surrounding estate to twenty thousand acres. She was a natural countrywoman and here she and Philip could quietly be farmers. Not the kind who mended fences in the lashing rain and were out lambing at dawn, true, but nevertheless the kind who cared about the land. Together, they looked after and loved it because it was a small part of the planet that was theirs. Here, in a corner of North Norfolk, they could actively participate in making the world a better place: for wildlife, for the consumers of their crops, for the people who worked the land, for the future. It was a quiet legacy – one they didn’t talk about in public (Charles’s experience on that front explained why) – but one they cared about very much.

  Available to preorder now

  Keep reading for a guide to Buckingham Palace by the author, exclusive to this edition of

  A THREE DOG

  PROBLEM

  S. J. BENNETT’S GUIDE TO BUCKINGHAM PALACE

  September 2021

  W

  elcome to the world of ‘the gilded office block on a roundabout’. When it came to the second book in the series, I knew I had to set it in the Queen’s most iconic residence. I walk past the Palace quite often on my way to work in the London Library. I’ve had a job interview there (more of that later) and I’ve been to medal ceremonies and on tours around the state rooms. I thought I knew it pretty well – but I had so much to discover.

  Did you know, for example, that Buckingham Palace has only been the official residence of kings and queens since 1837? Before that, they were based at St James’s Palace next door, and foreign ambassadors are still appointed to ‘the Court of St James’. King George III bought the original ‘Buckingham House’ from the impoverished Duke of Buckingham in 1761 to house his wife and children. It was a more simple, red brick mansion then, standing in an old mulberry orchard, and became known as the Queen’s House. It would have had a country feel, set away from the hustle and bustle of Whitehall. So, basically, almost the opposite of what we see today.

  British kings and queens don’t need to live there. For each one, it’s a choice. It’s had a chequered career and I honestly wonder how long it will be a royal home for. It’s huge and hard to maintain (more of that later, too) and not homely at all. But it is good for entertaining, and over the course of a normal year – remember those? – the Queen and her family personally entertain over fifty thousand people in the Palace and gardens, while another hal
f-million visit the state rooms while she’s away.

  The king who first fell in love with it was George IV, who had been a dashing, extravagant Prince Regent. He got his favourite architect, Nash, to blow the budget, creating wings that gave it a U shape, adding a grand entryway that later became Marble Arch, and giving the interior the gilded Regency bling effect that we know it for today.

  William IV hated it so much he wanted to give it to Parliament when their buildings at Westminster burned down in 1834, as the result of burning tally sticks in the stoves under the old House of Lords. (Did you know this? I did not.) However, Parliament turned him down and Victoria and Albert became big fans – even though at the time the Palace wasn’t big enough for their ever-expanding family and they had to close off the courtyard with a new building to create extra space. The façade that we see was not originally part of it at all.

  Today, the Palace has over 770 rooms, of which the Queen privately uses about seven. The others include a florist (all that entertaining), a post office, and somewhere housing an ATM machine. It’s like a little village surrounded by high walls and railings. Underneath, the River Tyburn flows from North London down towards the Thames. There are rumours of tunnels, which I’ve incorporated in the book, and even a secret personal Tube line for emergencies – which I personally don’t believe.

  What fascinated me when I came to do my research is that in 2016, when the story takes place, the Prime Minister was set to approve a programme of works to stop bits of the Palace from falling down. Unlike George IV, the Queen is famously frugal, and there was wiring that hadn’t been replaced since the 1950s. The ceiling above the State Dining Room was considered so dangerous the room couldn’t be used. Buckets under leaks were not unknown. It needed everything from new lifts to safe electrics – and that’s what it’s been getting during lockdown, when it was unexpectedly free of royals and visitors. The whole project was huge, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to build it into the plot.