by SJ Bennett
By now, Rozie had already done as much as she dared on her office mobile, which was the only one she had. If questioned, she could just about cobble together an excuse for each call she’d made so far, but any more would look beyond suspicious. And if questioned, she knew, she would never drop the Boss in it. She would take the rap, and then who would look like the sleeper agent to MI5?
She navigated expertly through familiar roads, past building sites, flash new blocks of flats and old ones dressed up in fancy cladding, mentally running through the list of calls and messages she needed to send before her first proper meeting. This was not the job Sir Simon had so graciously explained to her that glorious day in Buckingham Palace. She might joke about being a weed dealer to Mikey, but that’s how it felt. Rozie had tried all her life to do the right thing and stay out of harm’s way. Now . . . she was literally using her family to stay one step ahead of the Security Service.
No wonder the Queen had given her that strange look, that day in her office when she had first mentioned Henry Evans. She had known it would inevitably lead to days like this.
*
Westbourne Grove was not far from Ladbroke Grove geographically, but it would never have occurred to Rozie to meet Mikey here. Coffee shops adorned their mid-century modern chairs with sheepskin rugs, the single charity shop was full of designer cast-offs, and all the independent boutiques set out to appeal to the ladies who lunched and lived in pastel-coloured multimillion-pound houses around the corner. The number of black and brown faces among the white ones diminished with each passing street. From that point of view, it was a bit like being back at work.
Rozie found a parking space eventually – a proper one, this time – and checked her watch. Ten minutes to spare. She rubbed her hands with some shea butter and consulted the bright ankara notebook she had bought as a souvenir on a shopping trip with Fran and Fliss in Lagos.
After a few pages of bad poetry to put a casual reader off the scent, all information relating to the Brodsky case was captured old-style, in pencil on the notebook’s ruled paper, for fear of leaving a digital trace. Luckily, Sir Simon had no such concerns back in the office, and all the names, addresses and contact numbers for people who had been invited to sleep at the castle that night were faithfully recorded on a spreadsheet the Master of the Household had been asked to provide to the police. Rozie had accessed the file and copied them out yesterday morning. She called one of the numbers now (there had been no response yesterday) and spoke to a young man who agreed to meet her late in the afternoon. It would be her fourth interview of the day. Then it was time to head to Meredith Gostelow’s flat in Chepstow Villas.
The woman who met her at the top of the steps looked nervous and distracted. She was wearing an emerald-green floor-length robe above oversize retro trainers. Wild wisps of hair poked out of an extravagant red half-turban. Her only makeup was a slash of matching red lipstick. But there were bags under her tired blue eyes, laced with traces of yesterday’s mascara, and she avoided Rozie’s gaze while ushering her in.
‘Come this way. I haven’t . . . I didn’t know what you wanted.’
She led the way down a black-and-white tiled hallway to a small, untidy kitchen overlooking a shady garden.
‘Tea?’
‘Lovely. Whatever you’ve got.’
Meredith pulled two spotted mugs from a shelf, fished out a couple of teabags from an old, dented tin and sloshed in water from a kettle. Milk came from a fridge whose shelves exuded the odour of something long past its sell-by date. Rozie steeled herself for the interview to follow and was not remotely surprised when she felt something rub at her ankle and looked down to find a tortoiseshell cat staring back up at her with impassive green eyes. Of course the mad old bat would have cats.
The architect took a mug and wandered back down the hallway. Rozie picked up the second one and followed on, just in time to catch the emerald robe disappearing through an open doorway. She followed and stood . . . amazed.
The room was long and wide, with windows framed in lavish pink silk curtains. The walls were painted a delicate china blue, but they were almost hidden by a patchwork of paintings, lithographs and textiles in mismatched frames, a vast antique mirror and floor-to-ceiling shelves of books, immaculately arranged. Furniture was simple and geometric, but clearly expensive. A couple of console tables displayed collections of jade and little bronzes. The effect was breathtaking, and it was something to do with the hidden lights, the artful use of colour, the way the eye was constantly drawn to different details, and the confidence and perfect finish of it all.
Meredith Gostelow simply did not care about kitchens, Rozie realised. Or making tea. She cared about entertaining spaces, and she was a bit of a genius at creating them.
‘Excuse the mess,’ she said, picking up a paperback from a sofa seat – the only object out of place – and installing herself among its comfortable cushions. The tortoiseshell came to sit beside her. Rozie sat down on the matching sofa opposite and put her tea on the table between them – itself a work of art in bronze and glass.
‘This isn’t what I expected,’ she admitted.
‘Oh? What did you expect?’
‘I don’t know, exactly. I don’t know any architects. Something white and minimalist?’
Meredith sighed. ‘Everybody does. As if architecture stopped at Norman Foster. It’s so boring. What about maximalist? Clashing cultures, vivid memories. Isn’t it joyful? It’s what my clients pay me for.’ But she didn’t look joyful. She looked bleak.
‘Are you working on something at the moment?’ Rozie asked.
‘Several things, as always. Mexico . . . St Petersburg . . . You’re lucky you caught me in the country. I’m off to Heathrow at seven. Look, let’s get this over with, shall we? I assume you’re here about Maksim. Are you MI5?’
‘Definitely not,’ Rozie assured her, rather startled. ‘Quite the opposite, really.’
‘You said you were from the Queen’s Private Office . . .’
‘Yes.’
‘So who sent you?’
This was a perfectly legitimate question, and Rozie saw that she was probably going to be asked it quite a lot – if she was lucky to continue in the job beyond tomorrow. She needed a clever answer.
‘Her Majesty.’ There was no clever answer. All she had was the Boss’s magic dust.
‘Bloody hell.’ Meredith sat up straighter. ‘D’you mean it? Really?’
‘Yes.’ Rozie saw Meredith’s sceptical gaze transformed by wonder.
‘Why does she want to talk to me?’
‘I can’t answer that directly, but I can say that anything you tell me is in absolute confidence. She wants to know what Mr Brodsky did after the party. I gather from the way you were dancing you might have got close to him. Perhaps he talked to you that evening. Or did you already know him?’
The architect’s expression was a tangle of mixed emotions. Eagerness fought with wariness, then both were followed by something calmer. The planes of her face settled. She leaned back in her seat.
‘No, I didn’t know him. As I told the nice policeman who questioned me after he died. We danced the tango, that’s all.’
‘But it wasn’t all, was it?’ Rozie asked gently.
‘No, it wasn’t.’
There was a brief silence while Rozie wondered what to say. She thought back to Lady Hepburn.
‘I gather it was an amazing tango.’
‘Thank you.’ Meredith took it as her due. ‘I thought so. I learned it in Argentina.’
‘It was much admired.’
‘The Queen wasn’t there, though, by then. She’d gone to bed.’
‘True,’ Rozie agreed.
‘So why does she . . .? Why does it matter?’
‘I can only say it matters very much. She wouldn’t ask you if it didn’t.’
Meredith got up, walked over to a wall of artwork, then across to the window, from where she looked out at the cherry
blossom view. ‘If I tell you, do I have your word that it goes no further?’
‘Did you kill him?’ Rozie felt as if she was living in an alternate universe. How could such a sentence seriously pass her lips?
‘No, of course I didn’t!’ Meredith exclaimed. ‘This has nothing to do with his death. Don’t be ridiculous!’
‘Then you have my word. No further,’ Rozie said. She allowed the ensuing silence to fill the room.
Meredith stood for a moment, framed by the light.
‘Do you dance, Miss –?’
‘Oshodi.’ She pronounced it like they did at home: ‘O-show-dee’.
‘D’you dance, Miss Oshodi?’
‘A little,’ Rozie admitted.
‘Well, I dance a lot. Not often, but when I do, I dance with my very soul. I studied ballet as a girl, took all the exams. I wanted to be a ballerina, but then, who doesn’t? Then I grew these’ – Meredith gestured to her bosom – ‘and also too tall, and and and . . . We all have our excuses. I went abroad, travelled through South America, met a man . . .’
Rozie nodded, but Meredith obviously thought she wasn’t paying enough attention. The architect’s voice resonated with intensity as she walked across the room and sank into a seat beside her visitor.
‘He taught me to tango. And, Miss Oshodi, I’m very good. I’d forgotten how good I was, over the years, trying again with different partners and never quite capturing the flick, the drama, the spark.’ Meredith gestured with one arm and Rozie could well imagine her on stage, commanding an audience. ‘I gave up. My feet were still. And then there was Maksim. Of course, he was gorgeous – everyone must have told you that. And he danced with these beautiful young creatures and they were perfect, but they didn’t feel the dance to their very souls, didn’t give themselves up to it entirely. And, I don’t know, Maksim must have seen something in my eye. He asked me onto the floor of that Crimson Drawing Room and I said no. How could anyone follow those ballerinas? But he insisted and insisted, and someone said something encouraging beside me and the next thing I knew he was holding me and saying something to the pianist, and whoever that was struck up a brilliant version of “Jalousie”, and we were off.’
‘I wish I’d been there.’
‘I wish I hadn’t,’ Meredith rasped. She got up again and started pacing the carpet. ‘That dance brought out the eighteen-year-old in me, and at the same time something ageless in Maksim. You’d think he’d lived a thousand years, not twenty-four, or whatever he was. You see? I don’t even know his age! We hadn’t even spoken during dinner. Even then, our bodies did most of the talking and yes, when they say dancing is the vertical expression of horizontal desire . . .’
Rozie sensed where this conversation was heading, but couldn’t quite believe it. She fought to keep her expression neutral. Would it even have been possible . . .?
‘You became very close?’ she ventured.
‘We became absolutely intertwined. You get very physical with the tango – together and apart. When he pulls you in . . . It was obvious he wanted me. Of course I wanted him. I mean . . . it’s absurd, isn’t it? I can see from your face you think so.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—’
‘A fifty-seven-year-old woman and a twenty-something man. A woman like me.’ Meredith glanced down disdainfully at her breasts and belly. Rozie had seen flair when she first saw the emerald robe and trainers, but Meredith only saw the two stones in weight she had put on since the menopause. She moved more slowly, ached more frequently, had to work harder every day not to feel invisible.
‘I just meant . . . How did you do it? At the castle?’ Rozie asked.
‘Sleep with him?’ Meredith’s smile was both wry and triumphant. ‘Have you ever had one of those moments, Miss Oshodi, when you absolutely need to be with someone, and it makes no sense and it’s probably wrong, but nothing else matters?’
Rozie swallowed.
‘You know. You know! Well, Maksim and I both realised, on the dance floor, that this tango was just the start of something. We had to continue it. It was utterly, utterly mad and the most exhilarating feeling I’ve had in years. He whispered filthy things in my ear and when I whispered filthy things back, he laughed. He didn’t see our ages, my . . . this . . . it just didn’t matter. He asked where I was sleeping, and when I told him where the guest suites were, he said he’d sort something out. He had a word with that fabulously beautiful Peyrovski woman, who he obviously knew quite well, and I saw her smile and mutter in return. Then he told me he’d meet me in my room within the hour. Just to wait for him there.’
‘Um, so it was your room you went back to, not his?’
‘Yes?’ Meredith said. She sounded puzzled, rather than anxious at being caught out in a lie.
‘And did you go to his room at any point?’
‘No, of course not! Mine was much nicer. I had this gorgeous suite with Regency furniture, and I imagine he had a rabbit hole somewhere. Why would we go to his?’
‘I’m sorry, I interrupted you. You went back to your room.’
Meredith nodded. ‘I said goodnight to everyone and ostentatiously went up on my own. I was sure the feeling would wear off as soon as I was alone, but it didn’t: I just fizzed. Here I was in Windsor Castle and every cell in my body was alive. I wanted to laugh and make love all night. I felt . . .’ Meredith paused to find the right words, and bleakness stole back across her features. ‘I felt like me. Les neiges d’antan. Like I hadn’t done for a very long time.’
‘And he came?’
Meredith threw Rozie a look and screwed her face into a smile. ‘You could say that. He knocked at the door about thirty minutes later. He was clutching a spare bottle of champagne. We drank some of it and, as you say . . .’
Rozie gazed down at the piled-up art books on the coffee table. She couldn’t catch Meredith’s eye. ‘Mmm-hmmm.’
Meredith laughed. ‘He stayed for about an hour. Or two – I have no idea. And that is all I am going to tell you. I hope it’s enough. His phone went at some point. A text. He rolled over and looked at it and reluctantly said he must go, and he did. I smiled and said nothing. I was certain I’d see him again. Not as a long-term lover, don’t misunderstand me, Miss Oshodi. I didn’t think it was the start of a beautiful relationship. A friendship, perhaps. But the next thing I knew, he was dead and it was all . . .’ The bleakness was back. She looked hollow. ‘Over.’
‘Do you know what he did while you went up to your room?’
‘Not exactly. But he was wearing different clothes, come to think of it, when he came in with the champagne. A suit. I remember thinking it was a shame, because he’d looked so gorgeous in his dinner jacket, but then, he wasn’t wearing the suit for long.’
‘Did you have the impression he was meeting someone after you?’
Meredith sucked in a cheek while she considered. ‘No, not really. He might have been. He just said, “Don’t tell anyone about this,” but he said it laughing, not as if he was ashamed, but as if he wanted it to be our secret.’
‘Thank you for being so honest.’
‘I know I should have told the police, but as far as I know those were his last words. And I didn’t promise not to tell anyone out loud, but in my head I did. I keep my promises to the dead.’
And yet she had told the story now. It was the Queen’s magic dust that did it. Rozie felt powerfully the trust that Meredith had bestowed on her. She didn’t see how it helped explain Brodsky’s death, but perhaps the Boss would spot something she had missed. She got up and thanked the architect once again.
‘Actually, you’ve helped me,’ Meredith said. ‘I couldn’t really make sense of it until I said it out loud. I thought I’d done a terrible thing and been punished for it, but really, it was lovely.’
Rozie smiled. ‘I’m glad.’
‘Apart from the cystitis.’
There was a second’s silence while their eyes met and Rozie tried t
o bottle up the laugh bubbling in her throat, but she couldn’t do it. Then Meredith laughed too, throwing her head back and hooting.
In the end they hugged each other. Meredith accompanied her guest affectionately to the hall. ‘God, imagine you telling the Queen about my sex life,’ she said, opening the door.
‘I’ll do it gently,’ Rozie promised. ‘Only the salient details.’
‘Do it with brio,’ Meredith urged instead. ‘Do me justice. Don’t forget about that tango.’
Chapter 10
T
he council meeting was long and dull. The Privy Counsellors themselves, carefully chosen over the years, were a decent bunch whose wisdom and support had proved invaluable in difficult times. The Queen was a ruthless chairman who conducted the meetings standing up and never liked these things to overrun, but unfortunately there were myriad arrangements for the celebration of her upcoming birthday, and somehow they had found themselves on the council’s agenda. Really, all she wanted was a visit from the great-grandchildren, a few nice letters and a decent ride in Home Park. Instead there would be the lighting of beacons, endless events of various descriptions, most of them on foot, and, on the official day in June, a service under television cameras at St Paul’s Cathedral. One was used to it, of course. And glad of a grateful nation. But honestly.
Meanwhile, her thoughts kept straying to Rozie. Would she return tonight, as she had told Simon? When she got back there would be a lot for her to do, and the Queen still didn’t know if she was ready for it. She had done well with Henry Evans, but that wasn’t unduly difficult. And if things got complicated, she might not have time to follow up on all possible ideas anyway.
There was always Billy MacLachlan, of course. After working on her protection team, he had made it to chief inspector. He had helped often enough before, and as well as being utterly discreet, he was hugely inventive. He was good at asking questions without anyone really remembering he was there. She knew he was finding retirement dull. He might appreciate a job like this. Even if Rozie turned out all right, he could always help. Something to bear in mind, at least.