The Windsor Knot

by SJ Bennett

  The governor, who had been increasingly animated as he spoke, sank back in his chair again. ‘With my personally invited, drug-addicted overnight guest, you mean? Quite possibly. I couldn’t say.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sir Peter. I didn’t mean—’

  ‘No, no, don’t worry about it. Entirely my own fault. I should have got security to double-check everyone’s credentials. But it never occurred to me the vetting wasn’t up to scratch. The bloody thing was held in the name of national security, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Exactly,’ Sir Simon soothed. ‘You weren’t to know. What did Strong say? He interviewed the girl, too, didn’t he, about the murder? Did he make the same mistake?’

  ‘Damned if I know. He won’t tell me a thing, because of course Humphreys thinks we’re all working for the Kremlin. Even though I wrote the defence strategy for a Russian combined forces attack through Scandinavia when I worked in NATO. Perhaps he thinks that makes me more of a spy. God knows. I can only assume the girls were in it together, though. Otherwise why didn’t the real Rachel Stiles go to the police? They must have killed her because she knew too much.’

  ‘You think she was killed deliberately?’ Sir Simon asked.

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘I was beginning to wonder. So now that’s two dead.’

  Three dead, Rozie thought.

  ‘Anyway,’ the governor went on, ‘I went to the Queen this evening, ready to fall on my sword, and instead she was perfectly nice about it. Said of course it wasn’t my business to go second-guessing the vetting procedure. Which I gather is being redesigned as we speak. It’ll be upgraded once we’ve got time when the horse show’s over. Don’t talk to me about stable doors and horses bolting.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of saying any such thing,’ Sir Simon assured him.

  ‘You were thinking it.’

  ‘No, no, no.’

  ‘You’re grinning.’

  ‘I’m just happy for you that the Boss didn’t chew you out.’

  ‘Thank God Barbers Shop put her in a good mood.’ Sir Peter put down his glass and levered himself out of the chair. ‘Well, thank you for the port, Simon. Goodnight, Rozie. Christine’s waiting for me at home. Kylie Minogue arrives in seventy-two hours and they’ve put her in one of our spare bedrooms. Honestly, Christine’s task list for the visit puts my NATO defence strategy papers to shame.’

  Chapter 30

  A

  s soon as the Queen heard that the investigation had taken a new direction, she had started to relax. Billy MacLachlan had dangled the bait, and Humphreys had taken it at last. At Thursday’s brief meeting with an anguished Sir Peter, she had wanted to congratulate him on playing his part so well, but it was important to be quite innocent of all discoveries until one was officially told.

  On Sunday, the phone call she had been expecting finally came. She had just finished a light lunch with the family, before a last afternoon of events and prize-giving down in the park, when Sir Simon informed her that the DG of MI5 and the Met commissioner would like to arrange a meeting.

  ‘Once you’ve recovered, ma’am. From the festivities.’

  ‘You know me, Simon. I’ll be up bright and early tomorrow. Is it good news?’

  ‘They wouldn’t say, ma’am. But news, certainly. I understand there’s been at least one arrest. But they’d like to explain it all properly.’

  ‘They don’t plan to incarcerate any more of my servants, do they?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘Find a suitable time. Now, if I don’t go and see the horses there’ll be none left to see.’

  She went back down to Home Park, and it was delightful. From the pony club to the puissance champions, she was surrounded by passionate equestrians, ready for the ring in spotless breeches and gleaming boots, or grinning and spattered in mud from the driving course. Parents to whom she had granted rosettes many years ago now brought their little ones in their first tweed coats, balanced precariously on their rides like characters from a Thelwell cartoon. At the other end of the scale, there was a healthy turnout of stars who would be going to Rio soon, to compete for Olympic gold. If one could not follow them there, how nice that they could perform in one’s own garden, on a sunny day, with the castle as a benevolent backdrop. And then it was time for the musical ride of the Household Cavalry, and who could fail to be thrilled by that?

  But everything paled into insignificance beside the pageant that night. Anne and Edward had participated in the earlier versions on previous days. They had tried to tell her what to expect – one thought one knew – but nothing, nothing could quite prepare her for how special it turned out to be. So unlike some of those disastrous jubilee affairs. (The river thing had practically finished Philip off.)

  She arrived at the Castle Arena at dusk, in the glass-roofed Scottish state coach, with Philip beside her. There was an audience of six thousand waiting in the grandstands and five thousand more along the Long Walk outside, watching on giant TV screens. But it was the horses one had come for.

  It took a great choreographer to make this sort of event go with a swing and get nine hundred horses to perform with split-second timing. Dougie Squires had utterly excelled himself. There was the Omani cavalry, of course, who had been rehearsing on-site for weeks, and the Azerbaijani dancers, and the truly exceptional horse whisperer, who was like a magician with those animals, and Shirley Bassey, Katherine Jenkins and Miss Minogue, in rhinestones and sequins, looking so graceful and filling the stadium with sound. But what made it so very moving was the way Dougie had based it around one’s love of horses, and how very personal it was. If she was a weeper – which luckily she wasn’t – it would have been easy to shed a tear. Especially when Anne and Edward entered the arena with little Louise, riding her own pony, just as she used to do at that age, and so composed.

  On the way back, Philip asked, ‘Has that Humphreys johnnie been in touch about his idiotic witch-hunt?’

  ‘He has.’

  ‘I hope you put him right.’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘Good. And I hope he was suitably contrite.’

  The Queen’s head had been full of horses, but she brought it back to the matter in hand.

  ‘I’m not quite sure yet. I’ll have a better idea tomorrow.’

  ‘Tell me if you’re not happy. According to the papers, I know people who could have him erased from this earth.’

  ‘I think he is those people,’ she observed mildly.

  ‘Bugger,’ he said, and looked up at the floodlit castle.

  She laughed.

  *

  This time, Gavin Humphreys was more ready than ever. He had planned. He had prepared. He had made excellent progress. He was certain, this time, that he would perform.

  He wasn’t entirely sure Her Majesty would be able to follow his thinking, that was the only thing. He would probably have to slow down in some places and go over certain things. He had asked Ravi Singh to look out for moments of confusion and give him the nod, just in case he got carried away with explaining and failed to notice when he lost her. It was complicated. Lots of intertwining strands. He might even need to draw it out for her. He would normally use his touchscreen notebook for that sort of thing, but it was a bit newfangled for Windsor Castle. Paper. Plain paper – that was another couple of Ps. He got his secretary to find some to put in his briefcase before he left for Windsor in the official Jag.

  At 10.30 on Monday morning the Queen’s equerry showed him and the Met commissioner to the Oak Room, where their hostess greeted them before taking her usual seat near the window. The Queen seemed perky and relaxed, in a heather-hued twinset and pearls. Two of the dogs lay safely half-asleep at her feet and a third jumped up to sit beside her. Her assistant, the girl with the high-heeled shoes, lurked in one corner, while the equerry, all starch and gold braid, stood to attention in the other.

  Her Majesty looked in very good condition for a woman who’d been up until all hours, listening to Shir
ley Bassey and watching horses do tricks. Humphreys hadn’t seen last night’s pageant himself, but his wife had had the TV on in the background. The royals had all seemed very cheerful on-screen, and there were a lot of horses. He’d missed most of it because he had been busy practising what he was going to say.

  Now here he was, and Her Majesty was offering him and the Met commissioner tea or coffee. He asked for the latter, white with no sugar, and they indulged in a little polite small talk about the pageant, but soon she was asking the inevitable question.

  ‘So tell me, Director General – who killed Mr Brodsky? Do we know?’

  Humphreys sat up straight, legs slightly apart without manspreading, the way he had been taught in media training.

  ‘Yes, ma’am, we do,’ he said gravely – not entirely answering the question because he intended to build up to it. ‘And I might add, dark forces have been at work.’

  ‘You told me,’ she nodded. ‘Putin’s forces.’

  ‘Not actually those,’ he admitted. ‘At first we assumed Brodsky’s murder was a brazen message. In fact, it was the opposite: something intended to be wildly misunderstood. For a long time, we were looking in the wrong direction.’

  ‘Oh dear. Were we?’

  He nodded earnestly.

  ‘How unfortunate.’

  For the briefest of moments, Humphreys was reminded of the time his ten-year-old self had had to explain to his grandfather that, in taking apart his gold hunter pocket watch to see how it worked, he had accidentally broken it beyond repair. But this time, everything was fixed! And he was fifty-four. He shrugged off the memory and went back to his story.

  ‘Those forces might have stayed hidden a while longer,’ he went on, ‘if there hadn’t been a storm over the Arab Peninsula, and if a young woman hadn’t dropped her contact lens.’ He had practised this part, and he liked it. The Queen’s eyes lit up. Encouraged, he relaxed a little and said, ‘It’s a bit like chaos theory, ma’am. A butterfly flaps its wings in . . .’ Damn. It never paid to extemporise. Where did the butterfly flap its wings? Then there was a storm somewhere. But in this case a storm was a butterfly. He moved on swiftly. ‘In the, er, Amazon. And as a result, three people are dead.’ He paused dramatically.

  ‘Three people? Goodness.’

  The Queen was suitably impressed.

  ‘I must say at this point, there is one person who made the whole discovery possible,’ Humphreys added generously. ‘Without them I think we might still be trying to pull the threads together.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Sir Peter Venn. One of his visitors was not who she said she was. You see, in this case the person we were looking for was a woman. Cherchez la femme, ma’am.’

  The Queen cocked her head slightly to one side. ‘Ah. La femme. Yes. Quite.’

  ‘It pays to maintain an open mind. Thanks to Sir Peter, we began to focus on an entirely different group from that of your dine and sleepover.’

  ‘Sleep,’ the Met commissioner interrupted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dine and sleep.’

  God, the last thing he needed was Singh correcting his vocabulary. With a deep breath, Humphreys kept calm and carried on. ‘They were here for a meeting that had been due to take place the day before Brodsky was found dead. It was all about a project called the Belt and Road. That’s a Chinese strategy to—’

  ‘I know about the Belt and Road,’ Her Majesty assured him.

  ‘Oh. Ah. Good. Anyway, it was organised by MI6 and the Foreign Office, and kindly hosted by the governor. It might not seem connected to your little soirée, but bear with me. We’re actually looking at three interconnected cases.’

  Thank goodness he’d brought the plain paper. He delved into his briefcase, took a few pages out and stacked them on the coffee table in front of him, in landscape format. On the uppermost page he wrote ‘Brodsky’ in the middle, near the top, with a box around the name, then drew another box near the bottom right-hand corner, and circled it with a swish of the pen.

  Beside him, Mr Singh couldn’t contain himself. ‘The link to Mr Brodsky was extraordinary, ma’am. I’m still not sure how the director general did it. A real leap of the imagination—’

  ‘Thank you, Ravi. I’ll get to that. The purpose of the meeting, ma’am, was to share classified information on China’s thinking and make high-level recommendations on the UK’s response. The visitor in question – the one who was supposed to be here – was a young lady called Rachel Stiles.’ He wrote ‘Stiles’ in the empty box. ‘She was an expert on the Chinese economy. In this case, ma’am, it was China that was of interest. Not Russia at all.’

  ‘Goodness,’ the Queen remarked, levelly. ‘How fascinating.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ He wrote ‘Belt and Road’ in the bottom centre of the paper. It was simplistic, but he could see the diagram was going to turn out quite useful. An image flashed into his mind of it framed above his desk at home one day, and recounting to dinner guests how he’d used it to explain the Brodsky case to Her Majesty.

  ‘The meeting drew together experts from various fields. All carefully vetted, of course – but they were forming a new group. It turned out that nobody at the meeting had met Rachel Stiles in person before. Dr Stiles was in her twenties and had blue eyes and heavy, dark hair. So did the woman who arrived at the castle. She seemed to match the identity photo supplied on the vetting form. It wasn’t until Sir Peter’s subsequent revelation that we noticed some facial discrepancies, but these were quite small.’

  He paused, to see if the Queen was still following. She seemed to be.

  ‘Dr Stiles was unfortunately dead by the time we uncovered the deception. However, when we showed other participants a decent-sized photograph of her, they agreed: it was not Rachel Stiles they’d met. So the question was, who was she?’

  ‘I do hope you found out.’ The Queen raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Not to start with.’ Humphreys leaned forward and drew a third box in the bottom left-hand corner of his diagram. He considered writing a question mark inside it, but that would only mess the thing up later. He left it as it was – unfilled, glaring with possibility. Then he turned the paper to face Her Majesty, and tapped it thoughtfully.

  ‘For now, let us just call her the agent of a rogue state.’

  The Queen’s voice rang with bell-like clarity. ‘Oh? Which one?’

  Humphries had been going to build up to this, too, but she obviously wanted the information, so he gave in. ‘This might come as a surprise, ma’am.’

  ‘Not Russia, then?’

  ‘In fact, no.’

  ‘Or China?’

  ‘Not China either. It was an ally of ours, would you believe?’ He named it.

  ‘Really?’ She leaned forward, frowning. ‘And why were they spying on us?’

  ‘There’s a problem with the state in question, and actually, I believe it started with me.’ Humphreys thought he detected the faintest trace of a smile flit across the APS’s face. But perhaps he imagined it. The Queen merely looked intent and curious. ‘Last year, as I believe you were briefed, King Zeid chose to make one of his young nephews the head of his country’s police and intelligence services. We think he’s testing the boy – young man, I should say – to see if he has leadership potential. I gather you know Prince Fazal quite well.’

  The Queen nodded. ‘Quite well.’

  ‘I understand he occasionally visited you here at Windsor and at Sandringham, on holidays from boarding school and Sandhurst.’ She glowered. From what Humphreys had heard, she had treated the young man like a member of the family. ‘They spotted his lack of ideal leadership potential at the Royal Military Academy,’ he went on. ‘An excellent shot and tough as old boots, but constantly getting into fights in the town, and sneaking off to London to gamble in the casinos. I gather he only lasted two terms. He was young. Our top brass put it down to hormones. Nevertheless, he wouldn’t have been our first choice for head of his country’s police service, or the in
telligence side.’

  ‘Nor mine,’ the Queen agreed. From the tone of her voice, Humphreys suspected the lad had been nasty to the dogs, or possibly one of the horses.

  ‘As you know, we consider his first few months in the job to be . . . unsatisfactory. There has been an increase in state-sanctioned torture in the prisons. Certain activists have gone missing, believed dead. There are rumours – nothing confirmed – that he likes to have people brought to his house so he can deliver the coup de grâce himself. He regularly argues for war in the region. When I took over as DG, I made the decision to limit intelligence-sharing with his agency. I didn’t think he could be trusted to protect our sources. Needless to say, he was outraged.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I thought his uncle the King might complain to you about it.’

  ‘He didn’t.’

  ‘That in itself is interesting, ma’am. It suggests either the young man’s power is quickly fading, or the older man’s is. Anyway, it seems the Prince decided to take matters into his own hands. If we wouldn’t tell him what he wanted to know, he’d find out for himself. Since we’ve looked into it, it transpires that for several months he’s been trying to target our intelligence on a whole range of topics. Including the Belt and Road.’

  ‘How?’ the Queen asked.

  ‘How what, ma’am?’

  ‘Has he been trying to target it?’

  ‘Ah. It turns out he had a source in the FCO.’

  ‘Oh,’ the Queen observed blandly. ‘So there was an insider.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, and we’ve—’

  ‘But not in my castle.’

  ‘Well, ma’am, I was going to get to—’

  ‘I’m so sorry. Do continue.’

  Humphreys wrote ‘Fazal’ on his diagram, near the empty box, and underlined it.

  ‘Thanks to this person’s information, the agent was able to insert herself into the intelligence group at the castle. She was quiet, but by no means the only one to appear somewhat shy at first.’ Humphreys had a thought. ‘Not that you would remember, ma’am, but you might even have met her that evening, at a reception in the governor’s drawing room . . .’ He broke off to consider that extraordinary, unknowable possibility.