by SJ Bennett
‘No. Is DCI Strong very excited about the link?’
‘I would say he’s quite excited, ma’am. A hundred thousand pairs is a lot of knickers.’
‘Thank you.’
Rozie picked up the boxes and took them back to Sir Simon’s office. He was still on the phone, talking to Emily about engraved silver-gilt champagne coasters. He rolled his eyes dramatically, tapped his watch again and rolled his eyes some more. Rozie laughed. She was really very fond of him.
It was bad to lie to a man like that, but damn, it was exciting.
Chapter 21
T
he Quick Talk Internet Café in Clapham Junction contained three tables, a bar selling stodgy cakes and fizzy drinks, and a counter along the left-hand wall lined with eight computer monitors, six of which worked. It was fairly full for a Sunday morning, with five customers typing away at the keyboards and nursing their drinks. Two women in hijabs chatted quietly to each other, keeping an eye on a sleeping baby in a pram by the door. In the middle, a young man in a T-shirt was hunched over his screen, lost in concentration, while the elderly man beside him muttered to himself, scattering his keyboard with cake crumbs as he hit each new key with his middle finger and waited for the result.
The neatly dressed, slightly balding man in an open pea coat nearest the counter had not come here to chat or eat cake. He was on a diet and none of the food suited him. The tea was stewed and crappy. He sipped from a chipped glass of tap water and wished he was at home in his flat in Richmond, with all mod cons and a decent kettle, and a computer he knew his way around better than this one.
But his home computer had its own IP address. He was aware of private browsing protocols, but equally aware that if anything went wrong the best hackers in the country, working for the government, would be on his case in a heartbeat. Better to be here, in this anonymous little café, a ten-minute train ride away.
Billy MacLachlan had been researching Anita Moodie for twenty minutes, and as far as he was concerned he had already struck oil with her Instagram feed. The girl was addicted to selfies, and she’d been posting for years. There were over two thousand pictures and he was going through every one of them. This part of the job was no hardship (though that tap water tasted foul; even the tea had been better). The girl liked to travel. She’d lived the high life. She enjoyed beautiful things and beautiful places. He enjoyed looking at them, through carefully chosen filters, pausing to make notes for follow-up research.
There was a pattern to the singing gigs she had done since leaving the School of Oriental and African Studies, where she’d got her first degree. A very interesting pattern. MacLachlan sketched it out in the cheap spiral-bound book beside the keyboard. He took a sip of water, followed it with tea (no, the tea was still worse), and scrolled down some more.
*
The Queen was not the only person chagrined by the thought that Obama had arrived, with all the intelligence power the CIA could provide, and meanwhile the best brains in the police and MI5 hadn’t been able to solve a little local murder. It wasn’t for lack of trying.
DCI Strong looked up at the board attached to the partition wall in his Round Tower room, displaying an alarming array of suspects and question marks. A lot of people had access to Maksim Brodsky’s room that night, assuming he let them in, or they knew their way around a basic Yale lock. Once there, all it took to actually kill him and stage the scene was a strong pair of hands, a bit of training and some preparation. But who would want to? That was the problem David Strong kept coming up against.
The director general was still convinced about the sleeper spy theory, and he could be very persuasive. He was known in the intelligence world for a couple of fascinating insights into new and alarming strategies of supposedly friendly nations, based on painstaking back-room research. Patience and attention to detail were Humphreys’ watchwords. Patience, he assumed, had been the key characteristic of the palace sleeper, and if he was right, it had served the man well. The murder had been committed, the crime remained unsolved, From the sleeper’s point of view, it must be seen as a great success.
Although . . .
Strong was too polite to bring this up directly with Humphreys when they met with top brass, which was two or three times a week – but the Russian intelligence community was not gleefully celebrating the brilliant assassination of a dissident under the very nose of Her Majesty the Queen. Or, if they were, they were doing it so quietly that not a whisper of it had made it through to MI6’s ears in the Kremlin and various Russian outposts.
If you’re going to go to all that trouble to kill someone, and kill them in such a way, and after so much time inserting your killer into position, why keep it so firmly under your furry hat? After the killings of Markov in ’78 and Litvinenko in ’06, and the attempt on Gorbuntsov four years ago, the intelligence community had been alight with gossip and speculation, triumphalism and bravado, typical of Putin and his lot. Strong knew this, because he had asked. He wanted to understand Humphreys’ world, and when you work out of Windsor Castle, people tell you things.
This wasn’t the only reason Strong kept the field of suspects open. His natural due diligence was part of it. His team had investigated the ballet dancers exhaustively, and the boyfriend one of them was supposedly FaceTiming. (She was.) They had looked into Peyrovskaya’s maid, even though she was tiny. There was no DNA match with anything in Brodsky’s room. Not conclusive proof she wasn’t involved, but hardly proof she was.
Then there was the girl from the intelligence meeting. She had bumped into Brodsky in the corridor outside his room, after he got back from playing the piano in the Crimson Drawing Room. They had been seen together at the time by a passing housekeeper. She said she had dropped a contact lens and he had helped her find it, and the housekeeper had confirmed her story. For a time, Strong thought she was the last person to see him alive. But why would she attack him? It couldn’t have been planned. She didn’t know she’d even be staying till a few hours before.
Had they had a mad sexual tryst? Had he abused her in some way? Had it gone wrong?
Strong had wondered about this, but then he had made the bombshell discovery about the Russian valet. It was prompted by something the commissioner had said, relating a story he had heard (he said from the Queen herself, although he might have been embellishing) about shenanigans between visitors and servants, and bets about getting people past security and into the guest suites.
This had got Strong thinking one evening last week, as he ran through every possibility once again with his little on-site team of three. Of course, the main security at Windsor Castle was designed to keep out outsiders, and above all, to protect the Royal Family. It wasn’t particularly designed to protect visiting principals, as they were called, from their own servants. Yes, staff were not permitted to head down to the guest suites without an explicit invitation – but if a guest wanted to conspire to play musical beds with their maids and footmen, was there anything specifically to stop him? Or her?
Anyway, it had kicked off an interesting line of inquiry. The footmen and policemen on duty that night had been questioned again, a little more rigorously, and Strong had discovered that Vadim the valet had gone up twice, to visit first the beautiful Masha Peyrovskaya, then his master.
The first time, the master had been drinking downstairs with his hedge-fund friend, so it all made sense. But one of the DIs on the team had noticed a couple of strange details in the footmen’s accounts. The first time, the valet had kept his head turned away from the men in the corridors, talking to his companion, and his suit was grey. The second time, he had looked them square in the face, and his suit was black.
Bit odd. So the team had questioned the valet pretty hard, and in the end he’d cracked. Turned out, he hadn’t been having it off with the gorgeous mistress at all. He was gay, as he’d said, with a steady boyfriend. He had gone along with the story to please her, but the very last thing he wanted was any suggestion that they h
ad done anything together.
It had not been he, Vadim, the first time, who went upstairs with her. Nor any other man with the intention to make love to her – Vadim was sure of that. Masha Peyrovskaya was a precious jewel. She was loyal to her husband, and so excited to be at the castle that night. She would have done nothing to spoil the evening; she was not that kind of woman. In fact, it was Mr Brodsky who had gone up with her, and they were friends, just friends. They both loved music. Perhaps he had gone to discuss Rachmaninov?
When they’d talked to Masha, she had sold out Meredith Gostelow instantly. The architect was in St Petersburg at the moment for work, so they couldn’t talk to her in person yet, but she hadn’t denied Masha’s claim that she was the object of the young man’s attentions. So, Brodsky had had it off with the old lady, not the young one. Who’d have thought?
Which meant he’d been away from his room for a couple of hours that they’d had no idea about. Strong was ashamed of himself for that. It didn’t explain what happened next, though. The same security staff were certain the man they now knew to be Brodsky had gone back upstairs to the attic corridor alone. Meredith Gostelow had not accompanied him on that last journey. This put paid to Humphreys’ conjecture that, because she was working on a project in St Petersburg, the woman was somehow a Putinesque, middle-aged Mata Hari, sent in to seduce and murder Brodsky after chicken and petits fours. Shame, though. Strong had rather liked that idea.
Vadim could have killed Brodsky himself, when he got back from putting Peyrovski to bed, Strong considered. Again, why? Because Brodsky had impersonated him? Murder seemed a bit of an overreaction.
The person who seemed most terrified about the whole thing was Meredith Gostelow. From her hotel room in St Petersburg she kept begging them not to say anything, because of her reputation as an international architect. (Strong had never heard of her. That didn’t prove much, though, in the world of international architecture.)
Anyway, luckily for her, there was little danger of this nugget of information leaking out, because absolute paranoia about headlines in the press meant that this was the tightest, most locked-down murder investigation Strong had ever conducted, or was likely to. His micro-team were the most loyal men and women he could hope to work with. No documents were left lying around, ever. No stray messages made their way into WhatsApp groups. Other officers at the Met, helping with research and interviews, were given strictly limited background details. All questions, even from close friends in the force, were met with bland replies. Even so, various very senior government officials and Humphreys’ underlings would get in touch at regular intervals to make dire and unnecessary threats about what would happen if they were ever careless.
Only Singh trusted them to get on with their job and do it properly, the way they’d been trained. Strong liked the Met commissioner. He took a lot of crap, and didn’t pass it down the chain.
Meanwhile, Vadim Borovik had been the victim of this so-called homophobic attack in an alley off Dean Street in Soho. Strong was pretty sure that was a private matter to do with Peyrovski and his wife. He looked at his board again. Should he get the commissioner to tell Her Majesty about that, and about Brodsky being out and about after lights out? She probably had better things to think about. It was up to men like him to deal with the nasty details.
An email alert arrived on his laptop with a ping. He opened it and swore loudly. This was something the Queen would want to know about. He was just glad he wasn’t the one to break the news.
Chapter 22
I
t was the last quiet week at Windsor, before a return to town. Although ‘quiet’ was always a relative word for the castle, and especially so with the horse show coming up in just over a fortnight, and over a thousand horses to accommodate. Philip was in his element.
‘I’m off to Home Park to see how the obstacles are coming on for the driving.’
He was standing by the door, jacket on, car keys in hand. The Queen looked at her watch. In less than ninety minutes she had a meeting with the Master of the Fabric of St George’s Chapel, to look at a proposal for more attractive night-time illumination. You wouldn’t think that lighting an ancient building from the outside would be a major issue, but for the denizens of Windsor, the furore over white light versus slightly blue overshadowed the whole debate about Brexit. She needed a clear head for it.
‘I might come with you.’
It was a five-minute run in a Range Rover down to the arenas in Home Park, within sight of Castle Hill, which rose majestically behind them now, above the trees. Philip, as Ranger of Windsor Great Park, took his role very seriously and liked to inspect any important goings-on – and nothing was as important as the latest Royal Windsor Horse Show, which was about to play host to a record number of horses, several thousand visitors and a television team from ITV.
At the moment, the land in question was a quagmire, lined with flatbed trucks and metal tracks, and endless stacks of portable barriers. The foreman of works, anxious in steel-toed boots and a construction hat, pointed out areas of grass where the horseboxes would be parked, water and food provided and where the shopping tents would go.
Further along, work was being done to improve the grandstands.
‘The Queen’s been coming since ’43,’ Philip was telling the foreman. ‘Since the first one. They had dogs in the show, then, too. Until a Labrador snaffled the King’s chicken sandwich and they were banned forever.’ His barking laugh caused the foreman to take a step backwards.
‘Actually, it was a lurcher,’ she corrected him, coming over. ‘And they raised over three hundred thousand pounds. Enough for seventy-eight Typhoons.’
‘The tea, ma’am?’ the foreman asked, crinkling his brow in puzzlement.
‘The aircraft. We used them to help win the war.’
‘My grandad was at Dunkirk, ma’am,’ the foreman ventured more confidently, since they were being conversational.
‘Oh, was he? How interesting. Did he survive the war?’
‘Yes, ma’am. He played football for Sheffield Wednesday. He passed away five years ago. Fit as a flea till near the end.’
‘Good for him,’ she said. Though she was thinking the gentleman would not have been much older than she was. A generation hanging on by its fingernails.
Back in the castle, she felt grateful for that little burst of fresh air. Now she was plunged into a thousand details to consider. The whole family would be descending again, along with the King of Bahrain and his entourage. There was the question of the bedding for Room 225, the preferred suite for special guests. A housekeeper had noticed that the favoured linen was slightly frayed. Obviously they couldn’t use it, but should they recommission the Edwardian embroidery, and what to replace it with in the meantime? And would the Linleys mind not sleeping in their usual room because it was needed for someone else? And then it was time to visit the Master of the Fabric in his den near the chapel, and oversee the fateful decision about the lights.
That done, there was a message from the trainer to say that Barbers Shop had pulled a muscle during a workout and was less than a hundred per cent certain for the show. It would be a tragedy if he couldn’t make it. He had a real chance for the Ridden Show Horse and thoroughly deserved it, and anyway, she hadn’t seen him for months and was looking forward to his arrival from Essex with his trainer. When Sir Simon approached her in the Grand Corridor, looking dour, she said, ‘No bad news, thank you. I’ve had quite enough for today.’
But he didn’t give his little sardonic smile. Instead his face hardened. ‘It could be worse, Your Majesty.’
Which was hardly cheering.
‘Come in. Tell me.’
They went to the Oak Room, overlooking the Quadrangle, where she sat down and he explained that Sandy Robertson, her favourite page, had taken an overdose of paracetamol and was recovering at St Thomas’s Hospital, having been discovered at home in Pimlico by his daughter.
‘Thank you, Simon.’
She looked utterly bereft, he thought. Bleak and defeated. He backed out of the room quickly to give her time to wipe away a tear if she needed to.
Alone, she took a breath.
‘Bastard,’ she muttered, and she didn’t mean poor Sandy.
*
Days passed without noticeable progress. In the kitchens, the laundry rooms and the Master of the Household’s offices, nerves crackled and tempers frayed as everyone got by on too much coffee and too little sleep. In one of the cold rooms, the pastry chef was pouring a third batch of chocolate into moulds for a new type of truffle to be served at one of the big receptions in a fortnight. He had been trying to get the ganache finish right for two days now, and it refused to work. He only had a few hours left in this room, with these moulds, before he had to pack up his section’s equipment to take back to Buckingham Palace. They only took the essential, personal implements they liked to work with every day, but even so, it added up. Then he’d be straight into garden party preparations before heading back here for the horse show, with only three days on-site to get ready.
The under-butler who had speculated so accurately about the initial police investigation into Mr Brodsky’s sex life at the castle was busy wondering if she was in the right place. For years, the idea of working for the Queen had been a dream. Then, after her top-class training, she was thrilled out of her mind when she passed the final interview. But for the last few days she hadn’t got to bed before one in the morning. Each shift seemed to bleed into the next. And this morning she got shouted at by Prince Andrew for accidentally blocking a doorway while carrying two heavy chairs. She wouldn’t mind, but what was it for? When loyal servants like lovely Sandy Robertson got suddenly sent home, and everyone was told not to contact him, and now there was a rumour the poor man was in hospital. Is that what it came to? Is that all you got? There were websites offering six-figure salaries in big houses in warm countries for people with her background. Tonight, she might have another look at them.