The Windsor Knot

by SJ Bennett

  Rozie felt left out, but not abandoned. This surprised her. She thought she’d be more resentful of the Queen for not explaining herself more clearly – but that was simply how the Boss worked. She was not your friend, and you were not her confidante. For someone who was constantly entertaining, she led a very lonely life and after so many leaks and stories over so many decades, starting with her own governess, who had misunderstood what could and couldn’t be shared about the little princesses, it probably took years to earn her trust. Her dresser had it, Rozie thought – but she’d been with the Household since 1994. Rozie had been here for six months.

  *

  Gavin Humphreys was a methodical man who lived by an old adage, beloved of his military father, known as the Seven Ps. Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance. The Director General of MI5 planned, he was prepared and he never expected to underperform.

  So, a call to Buckingham Palace to update the Queen on progress in the spy hunt was nothing to be unnerved about. It was only as he was leaving his office on Millbank that he felt a quick flutter of nerves. It would be nice if all the planning and preparation had actually produced an eighth P by now: Progress. These things were not to be rushed, of course; Her Majesty would understand that. She was very understanding all round, from what Singh had told him.

  However, the Duke of Edinburgh had taken things badly yesterday, apparently. And the valet theory had proved to be a bit of a blind alley, which was awkward. It had looked promising to start with: the man’s ex-girlfriend had worked for not one but two hotel chains run by known Putin sympathisers in Turkey. It would have been easy for the FSB to get to him through her, but it turned out he had a new girlfriend – a clerk of some sort in the Royal Household – and he’d been in her bed the night of the dine and sleep. She was the daughter of the deputy head of GCHQ, and as witnesses went, about as unimpeachable as one could hope for, dammit. They were also not significantly further along with the royal page or the archivist. Humphreys was beginning to suspect the agent was planted even more deeply than they’d anticipated.

  Vladimir Putin had played his cards brilliantly, not for the first time. He was an unprincipled twenty-first-century dictator, but you had to admire the man.

  An equerry accompanied him to the door of the Queen’s Audience Room, where the meeting would be. He took a deep breath, and prayed there wouldn’t be corgis.

  There weren’t. The room was surprisingly normal, after all the marble and statues leading to it. It was painted blue, with the usual art and antique mirrors, but it had a light, feminine touch. The high-heeled assistant was there, and the Queen asked if he minded her staying to listen, which he didn’t. Even better, there was no sign of a furious Prince Philip. Her Majesty was, as Singh had said, all polite encouragement and sympathy. She knew how difficult, and how essential, the job of protecting the nation was.

  They sat on silk-covered chairs. He did a reasonable job, he thought, of explaining the difficulties of exposing Putin’s cunning infiltration, but asserted that with time they would most certainly get to the bottom of it. He sensed Her Majesty’s continued displeasure at the disruption to life at Windsor Castle. She was too invested in her servants. Humphreys wouldn’t know about that – he and his wife had a cleaning lady who came twice a week, and whose surname they still didn’t know. It paid not to get sentimental, but of course you couldn’t tell the sovereign that, especially at her age. He courteously assured her they were going as fast as they could.

  ‘There’s one interesting detail,’ he mentioned, by way of encouragement. ‘We’ve established that a visitor to the castle that night was an impostor. It was the governor who spotted it.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘She had a minor role, ma’am. No serious threat to national security, but of course we’re looking into that, too, and we’ve already had a lucky break with that investigation. It’s very unlikely that it’s connected to the Brodsky case. She wasn’t even supposed to be staying here. One of those strange coincidences.’

  He smiled and shrugged. The Queen smiled too, and it was time to wind up the visit.

  ‘I’ll see you out,’ she said, which seemed to him unusual, but it was her palace, and she said she was going that way anyway.

  As they walked down the thick-carpeted corridors, with the equerry and the high-heeled assistant three paces behind them, the Queen mentioned conversationally how busy she was going to be now that the summer schedule was under way.

  ‘Lots of visits to schools and universities, as one does.’

  She mentioned a few. For someone her age, her memory was pretty sharp. One of them was the school where Brodsky told her he’d learned piano, apparently, which brought the mood down a bit. A place called Allingham. She remarked that the Russian had been an excellent pianist and she was looking forward to seeing the music department. And then they were at the stairs and the visit was over. Humphreys was grateful she hadn’t mentioned the valet. More than that, she’d been positively chatty. As he left through a side door to search for his driver, he sighed with relief.

  As soon as he got back to his desk, a call from the Met commissioner came through.

  ‘How was she?’

  ‘Perfectly fine. Any news your end?’

  ‘Actually, something’s happened. We’ve got some interesting CCTV footage. It’ll come through your channels anyway, but I thought you’d like to know.’

  Chapter 27

  O

  n Thursday, the Japanese Prime Minister came to visit. Standing on a podium next to David Cameron, like President Obama before him, Shinzō Abe warned of the dangers of voting for Brexit in the upcoming referendum. Even the Japanese were concerned. Rozie hated all the doom and gloom, but she wasn’t too worried. After all, the Scottish referendum had turned out well in the end. Besides, Japan wasn’t her problem today. The audience with the Queen would be a short one and Sir Simon ate that kind of diplomacy for breakfast.

  It was Rozie’s day off and as next week would be crazy-busy Sir Simon had told her to take it. So she was meeting a billionaire in a suite in Claridge’s for the afternoon. Masha Peyrovskaya had asked to talk to her again.

  What surprised Rozie, walking into the gleaming, butterscotch lobby of the smartest hotel in London, was not how overwhelming all the low-key luxury was, but rather how at ease she felt. The job was rubbing off on her. So had her previous one at the bank at the bank, where team-building weekends were routinely held in spa hotels in the country, and client dinners in the private rooms of restaurants lit by Venetian chandeliers and fuelled by vintage wines. She liked vintage wine now, and knew a bit about it. She liked the click of her Francesco Russo heels on the lobby’s black-and-white marble floor. She liked the momentary flash-freeze on the concierge’s face when she mentioned Masha’s name, before she was smoothly directed to the Grand Piano Suite. Her own face did that too, when meeting a king or president. But she was getting just as good at the smooth part afterwards.

  Upstairs in the suite, Masha was seated at the piano, playing something bold and dramatic, her body swaying as her arms reached for distant keys. Rozie stood watching for a while without saying anything. The personal maid who had opened the door to her disappeared into another room.

  Eventually, the piece drew to an end. Masha took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

  ‘Tchaikovsky,’ she said, without turning. ‘It suits my mood.’

  ‘You play really beautifully.’

  ‘I know.’ Masha glanced towards the window to her left, where the net curtains had been pulled back to reveal the Mayfair roofscape. ‘I should have been a professional.’ She shrugged and gave Rozie a faint smile. ‘You came. And how is Her Majesty?’

  ‘Very well, thank you.’

  ‘You send her my kind regards?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘If she ever . . . want to listen to more Russian piano-playing . . .’ Masha looked wistful.

  Rozie wondered at first if she was angl
ing for some kind of job. Then she realised; the poor woman just wanted to see the Queen again, to be close to her. The Boss had that effect on some people. Actually, on most people, in Rozie’s experience.

  ‘It’s a shame she can’t hear Mr Brodsky,’ Rozie said, changing the subject slightly. She was still not entirely sure why she’d been summoned.

  ‘You like a drink?’ Masha asked. She got up and walked over to a velvet sofa, throwing herself down on it at a rakish angle. Rozie sat more decorously on one of the armchairs opposite. Masha was wearing skinny jeans and no shoes, a loose T-shirt and several necklaces. Her hair looked unwashed and unbrushed, and there was not a trace of makeup on her. She was, if anything, more beautiful than before.

  Rozie was about to suggest a cup of tea when a butler emerged bearing a tray with tea, coffee, still and fizzy water, two kinds of smoothie and a crystal bowl of fruit.

  ‘Please, be comfortable,’ Masha insisted, with a grand gesture to Rozie that dismissed the butler at the same time. He withdrew. Rozie grabbed a pink smoothie, kicked off her shoes and tucked her feet underneath her. She still had no idea what was going on, but she might as well enjoy it.

  ‘How can I help?’

  What followed was a very strange hour, in which Masha poured out her marital woes to Rozie in unsparing detail.

  ‘He treats me like a snail under his shoe. He thinks all I care about is art, but how can he know what I think when he never talk to me? We have not made love since seven weeks. He used to be a wonderful lover but now . . . he do it like he hate me.’ Masha stared up at the ceiling. ‘His last present to me was a little bichon frise. He say a bitch deserve a bitch. Can you imagine? To his wife? I give the dog to the cook. He sack the cook. And she was a good cook.’ Now she played with her ring, spinning the gull’s egg diamond around her finger, watching it catch the light. ‘Every day, he question me about Vadim. Is he really gay? Was it a game? Did we have threesome? He is disgusting. He deny ordering the beat-up, but I know it is true. He is mad with me for helping Maks. I said I would leave him and he said go. So I go – here – to the most expensive hotel room I can find. He have me watched but I don’t care.’

  ‘It sounds . . . difficult,’ Rozie said, aware of the understatement. She could never stay with a man who used a dog as an insult, let alone the rest. But then, she would never have accepted the gull’s egg ring in the first place. They tended to come with conditions, she thought.

  ‘Do I leave him?’

  ‘I’m no expert—’

  ‘You work for the Queen! You give expertise at highest level, all the time.’

  ‘Not in matters like this.’

  ‘She has four children, all divorced!’

  ‘Only three of them. The Earl of Wessex—’

  ‘She understands the pain. She asks for your advice, no?’

  ‘She really doesn’t.’

  ‘I think she does,’ Masha said with finality, spinning round on the sofa and rearranging her languid limbs so her legs were tucked underneath her, like Rozie’s. ‘I think she trusts you. I trust you. You have something. You are the only person I trust. That is why you are here.’

  ‘I don’t think—’

  ‘You don’t yap, yap, yap like all the others do, giving me advice, telling me to leave him, like my mother, or stay until I earn a billion in divorce, like my sister, or stay forever, like my baba. What should I do?’

  Rozie frowned. ‘You’re really asking me?’

  ‘Of course. Tell me. Now you are smiling. Why are you smiling?’

  Rozie refused to be drawn in. ‘You said it yourself, Masha. You don’t want people telling you what to do. You know all your options. What do you want?’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Masha looked genuinely thoughtful. ‘Nobody ask me that before. Ha! You are clever! You see.’

  ‘My sister’s a counsellor,’ Rozie admitted. ‘It’s her you should be talking to.’

  Masha raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh? OK.’

  ‘I was joking. She’s in Frankfurt.’

  ‘That is where? In Surrey?’

  ‘No – Frankfurt. In Germany.’

  Masha gazed at the ceiling for a moment, thinking. ‘OK.’

  ‘What do you mean, “OK”?’

  ‘I mean, I fly her back to London for sessions. She can come here, talk to me in Claridge’s. She can tell me what to do.’

  A vivid image spooled through Rozie’s head: Fliss, getting on a regular flight to Heathrow; Fliss, here in this suite, sipping smoothie and talking to a beautiful, sad Russian. She would absolutely love it. And she’d get the chance to catch up with family before going home.

  Masha was quite serious about the offer. Pleading, even.

  ‘I’ll ask her,’ Rozie said. But she knew that though she’d tell Fliss all about it, she’d never present it as a serious proposition. The last thing she wanted was her sister getting caught up in the world of Yuri Peyrovski. She believed Masha’s story about how Vadim got beaten up. This stunning woman in the Grand Piano Suite was more at risk, she thought, than most of the people she knew, and she knew plenty of people whose lives were precarious. Suddenly the sense of threat, which had receded as the Queen looked into the Belt and Road girl, felt very real again.

  *

  After the visit, she took the opportunity to do some shopping in nearby Oxford Street. Half an hour later her feet were hurting in their heels and she was shocked and upset by some idiot practically pushing her into the path of a bus. If it hadn’t been for her quick reactions it could have been nasty. She decided to take the Tube from Oxford Circus back to Green Park.

  It was at the top of the escalator going down to the platform that she felt the first prickle of alarm. Perhaps the bus incident had done it. But when she got jostled, hard, and almost flung down the right-hand side, she could have sworn she saw a smirk on the face of the tall, blond guy on the step behind her as she flailed to catch her balance. This time, it was the man in front of her who saved her, reaching out a hand to grab her arm.

  ‘Wear trainers next time, mate. Idiot,’ he muttered.

  ‘Yes. Thank you,’ she said, too distracted by the vanishing smirk to take the other guy on.

  She glanced behind her as she threaded her way through the lunchtime crowd towards the Victoria Line. She was looking for the shock of blond hair, but it was gone. All the time she wondered if it was just coincidence, if she was being paranoid. But when she reached the platform, she took care to stay well back from the edge.

  A train came a minute later and she got into one of the middle carriages. It was comfortingly full of people – so busy, in fact, that she had to stand. A group of rowdy students got in behind her. Only one stop. She’d be glad to get home.

  But as soon as the train moved off, she felt movement in the group of students. Her pricked senses caused her to look round and glimpse a flash of blond underneath a dark grey hood. He was three feet away, moving closer, with no expression, but when he briefly caught her eye he flashed the smirk again. The students parted to let him through. A vestige of her military training told her there was something odd about the way he was moving his arms and shoulders. She looked down to see his left hand folded into a fist, at once gripping and hiding something small and dark.

  Looking up, she made sure not to catch his eye again. He was calm and steady, the smirk fixed in place. Whatever he had come to do, his body language said he was prepared and unstoppable.

  He was a foot away. She guessed his height at six foot two – three inches taller than her – and his weight at about seventy kilos. He was slim, but muscular, with the neck of a weightlifter and the even tan of a man who exercised a lot outdoors. Some people might think him good-looking, but there was a wolfishness about his expression. She wouldn’t have liked him, even if she didn’t think he was carrying a knife.

  The train was at maximum speed now, plunging noisily through the tunnel. She shifted her own weight onto the balls of her feet and looked around at the nearby passengers,
assessing the risk to each one. There was more space near the further door of the carriage, so she pushed her way towards it, apologising gently as she went. He went at a similar speed, smiling his apologies too.

  Reaching the doors, she stopped. She didn’t look round, but she could sense him behind her. Soon his reflection came into view, distorted in the glass. He wouldn’t do anything yet. He would want to wait until the train was at the station so he could do what he had come for and make a quick getaway. She guessed a jab to the body – something low and hard to spot. But maybe he wouldn’t do anything now anyway, if he thought she’d spotted him.

  The train plunged through the tunnel for another thirty seconds, then juddered and began to brake. He was right up close. She took a breath and tried to relax her shoulders. Metal squealed on metal and they were both thrown sideways a little as the train slowed rapidly.

  The punch came from nowhere, and the pain was blinding. He staggered back into another passenger, putting his right hand up to his nose. He still couldn’t see, and he felt cartilage where it shouldn’t be. She’d broken it. The bitch.

  He lashed out at her with his other hand, the one grasping the knife, but before he could make contact the handle was knocked from his grip. Instinctively bending to get it, he felt another flash of almost paralysing pain. She had nutted him in the face this time, knocking his jaw back with the top of her head. Ignoring the terrified shouts coming from behind him, he growled his fury and lunged at her, receiving a sharp knee to the balls. All the breath left his body.

  She was just a secretary in fuck-me shoes! Fuck her! He was on his knees and as his vision started to come back fully he saw the knife on the floor, an arm’s-length away, as the train pulled into Green Park station. Everyone around was drawing back. He made a lunge for the knife; she shouted at him to stop but he didn’t listen. Next thing he knew, he was lying prone with her weight on his spine and his right arm bent tight behind him.

  ‘Make a move and I’ll break your fingers,’ she grunted into his ear, so he could hear her over the panic and shouting.