The Windsor Knot

by SJ Bennett

  ‘I suppose I might,’ the Queen said meekly. ‘More coffee?’

  ‘I – uh . . .’ Humphreys realised he was parched. His original cup had gone cold, but was replaced by the silent footman. He drained the new one and felt a momentary wave of confusion.

  ‘Where was I?’

  ‘In the governor’s drawing room,’ the Queen prompted. ‘With the spy.’

  Humphreys smiled gratefully. She was sharper than she looked. Which was useful, under the circumstances.

  ‘Yes, of course. And that should have been it. They were all due to go home that night, but a key analyst at the meeting had been held up on his way here from Djibouti by a storm. This was the storm I mentioned at the beginning, ma’am. The one like the butterfly in the— Anyway, his connecting flight from Dubai was delayed by several hours, and the main meeting was postponed, so the governor arranged for the others to stay here overnight, unplanned.’

  ‘Yes, he told me about that.’

  ‘A generous decision. He wasn’t to know the consequences. The group stayed up for a while, talking and drinking, including the so-called Dr Stiles. The others said that by this point she was quite animated, joining in and making jokes. They liked her. Looking back, it’s rather impressive, ma’am, in its way.’

  ‘Is it?’ the Queen asked, somewhat briskly.

  Humphreys backtracked a little. ‘Well, obviously everything she did was reprehensible. But you have to admire the enemy sometimes. Courage in the face of adversity and all that . . .’

  ‘I prefer not to think of my hospitality as adversity, Director General.’

  ‘No, no, of course not.’ He took another sip of coffee. ‘Anyway, they all went up to their allotted rooms sometime before midnight. They were scattered around in various attic locations. Stiles, or rather, the agent, happened to be above the Visitors’ Apartments.’

  Humphreys could see those apartments now, from where he was sitting, through the wide expanse of glass overlooking the Quad – row upon row of Gothic windows set into heavy stone, with turrets and crenellations and thickset towers. And he could imagine the panic of the unprepared young woman, trapped in the oldest inhabited castle in the world, surrounded by police and armed members of the Foot Guards. The Queen might not think the agent was brave, but he did. He had known of young women in similar situations, in other places, serving their country in difficult circumstances. He didn’t underestimate what it took.

  ‘At around half past midnight, one of the housekeepers saw her on her way back to her room from the shower. She was wearing a towel, with another around her hair. She was crouched down, looking for something. The housekeeper asked what it was, and she said it was a contact lens. This information seemed irrelevant at first, but then we realised it was essential. The lenses are important, ma’am, because as we subsequently discovered, the agent had brown eyes, and Rachel Stiles’s were blue. So we now know these were blue contact lenses that she badly needed for the next day.

  ‘The housekeeper offered to help her look, but she declined. Then, by sheer chance – and that’s the thing about this whole sorry affair, it was just pure chance, ma’am – Maksim Brodsky came out of his own room, a few doors away. Yes, finally we arrive at Mr Brodsky. I was getting there, ha ha.’ He picked up his pen and tapped the ‘Brodsky’ box on the diagram.

  ‘He was on his way somewhere else. But the key point is, he saw this girl, saw her with her hair up, scrabbling around for something on the floor – and he bent down to help her. And that, ma’am . . . is where he made his terrible mistake.’

  This time, Humphreys’ dramatic pause was positively Pinteresque. It was like waiting to announce the winner of The Great British Bake Off. Everyone held their breath.

  Eventually, Mr Singh couldn’t take it any longer. He leaped in. ‘This is where Mr Humphreys had his revelation, ma’am. It was a real leap of inspiration. I’m still not sure how he did it.’

  ‘Thank you, Ravi.’ Humphreys gave a self-deprecating shake of his head. ‘I couldn’t have done it without you and your men. And women, of course. It was an absolute team effort.’

  ‘But to connect three totally separate investigations. It was a stroke of brilliance.’

  Humphreys had the grace to blush. Looking down at his thighs, he picked an imaginary piece of fluff off the knee of his trousers, then took up his pen and scored a line along the bottom of the paper, between the empty box and ‘Stiles’.

  ‘Not brilliance,’ he demurred. ‘Just luck. And teamwork, as I say. And—’

  ‘And what was it?’ the Queen interrupted. ‘This stroke of brilliance?’

  Humphreys was too modest to look her in the eye. He found himself telling the story to Willow, or possibly Holly. One of the corgis, anyway, curled up on the seat beside Her Majesty.

  ‘Mr Singh mentioned three investigations. Six days ago, while we were already looking into the Stiles case, we received an anonymous tip-off through our website about a potential spy. The source was right – we quickly found a pattern of payments to an offshore bank account. Significantly, both abroad and at home this person associated with certain contacts who were already on our radar. Contacts who work for Prince Fazal, in fact. The desk officer flagged it to Director K Div, who immediately put a note on my desk with the file. I believe I was talking to you at the time, Commissioner, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. We were discussing the Duke of Edinburgh’s val—’

  ‘It’s not important. What matters is, in the Stiles case we were looking for someone who might have passed herself off as an expert on Chinese finance – an, er, a female, obviously. And here was woman called Anita Moodie, who was born in Hong Kong and educated in England, spoke Cantonese and Mandarin fluently, and was about the right age and size . . . Surely, I said to myself, we’ve found her. But there was something else.

  ‘It was when I was looking at Moodie’s case file, not long after you left, Commissioner, thinking about Stiles, that it all came together. It wasn’t the money trail, or the associates, or the places she’d been. It was a simple detail – so small I’m surprised I noticed it. It was the name of Moodie’s boarding school. Oh.’

  He looked up. The assistant in the corner had been taking a drink and was choking on some water that had gone the wrong way. She raised a hand apologetically. He carried on.

  ‘Moodie went to this place called Allingham. The name rang a bell and I remembered – it was in the police files, of course – Maksim Brodsky went there too. As soon as I realised, it hit me in a flash. This was our visitor. Moodie was here. And, quite simply, Brodsky recognised her from school when he bent down to help with the lens. There she was, without the heavy wig, and with at least one eye its natural colour. He would have seen straightaway that it was her.

  ‘I checked the dates: Moodie was in the year above Maksim Brodsky at Allingham. You know how you tend to remember the people in the year above you? Well, perhaps you don’t, ma’am – you were tutored here, of course – but people do. More to the point, it turns out they had played music together. He accompanied her at various concerts. There was no question of her pretending he had got it wrong. He knew her as Anita, but here she was Rachel. He knew her as a musician, but here she was a City analyst. She had to fix this by morning, before he started talking about this schoolmate he’d met.’

  Humphreys stopped. The room was silent again. He realised he had been talking rather fast, and perhaps a little too enthusiastically, but he still remembered his epiphany as if it were five minutes ago. He often relived it, and always with a shiver of . . . one could hardly call it pleasure in the circumstances, but satisfaction, certainly.

  ‘Gracious,’ the Queen said at last. ‘You’re a very instinctive investigator, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he agreed, with more than a little pride.

  She smiled, and in that moment, he thought she looked really quite attractive, for an old lady.

  Glancing modestly down again, to avoid her s
apphire gaze, Humphreys scribbled ‘Moodie’ in the last, empty box on his diagram and drew a line between that and the ‘Brodsky’ box at the top of the triangle, connecting them all at last.

  ‘There it is, ma’am. The international influence of the British boarding school system. One unfortunate encounter and . . . there we are.’

  The Queen’s gaze was still intense. ‘And are you sure it was she who killed him?’

  ‘Absolutely, ma’am. Once we identified her, we immediately matched her DNA to that found in Brodsky’s room. Even her fingerprints were there. But perhaps the commissioner can talk about that part better than me.’

  The man beside him looked reticent. ‘If you like.’

  ‘Go ahead, Ravi,’ Humphreys said expansively. He sat back at last, crossed his legs, and wondered if it would be rude to take the diagram with him when he left.

  The commissioner addressed himself to the Queen.

  ‘Miss Moodie didn’t try and solve the problem straightaway, ma’am. In fact, she couldn’t. Perhaps it was Mr Brodsky’s absence that gave her the chance to consider her plan. Because, you see . . .’ He wasn’t sure how to say this, until he remembered that it was the Queen herself who had alerted him to this side of things. ‘He had an assignation. With one of your guests.’ He checked her reaction and, to his relief, she didn’t look like a woman who needed smelling salts. Even so, talking to Queen Elizabeth II about this sort of thing, he felt slightly light-headed himself.

  ‘Mr Brodsky joined this, er, person downstairs in her suite and it all . . . went quite well.’ He felt his cheeks go warm. ‘And afterwards he went outside for a cigarette.’ He coughed. He was not making this easy for himself. ‘By the time he got back, Miss Moodie must have found an excuse to join him in his room. She was an old friend, after all. It’s possible that she went in with the hope of seducing him, but he wouldn’t have been very . . . He was probably quite . . . you know . . . tired. Anyway, at some point in the early morning, she overpowered him. Given the broken bones in his neck, we believe she strangled him manually before applying the ligature. He would have been relaxed in her company, so it would have been easy for her to surprise him. She was small, but strong. Trained, we assume, and desperate.’

  ‘How dreadful,’ the Queen said, in such a way that Singh felt for the first time that he was not recounting a case to a royal, but talking about an ugly death to a person who really cared. It took him back to his early days as an officer on the beat.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said quietly. He noticed that she nudged her ankle against the nearest dog on the floor beside her. He wanted to reach across the coffee table and squeeze her hand. But he didn’t, and the moment passed.

  ‘And so now there was a body. There would be questions in the morning. She had to make it look like an accident. But, more than that, she must have been panicking that if there was an investigation, a public one anyway, we would quickly discover the real Rachel Stiles hadn’t been here. She needed to make it as hard for us as possible. The question was, how?’

  Singh had asked the question rhetorically. He was about to answer it, but the Queen did so first.

  ‘By bringing me into it,’ she said grimly. ‘By making it all so sordid that my reputation must be protected.’

  She was absolutely right. He was impressed by how fast she got it. It was almost as if she knew. ‘Exactly, ma’am,’ he nodded. ‘Miss Moodie staged a scene. She stripped Mr Brodsky of his clothes and put him in the dressing gown provided by the castle. She put the cord round his neck and tightened it, then arranged him in the wardrobe with the other end of the cord tied to the handle. But she didn’t pull it tight enough to—’

  ‘I know about the second knot,’ the Queen reminded him.

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Of course. At first, we were confused because there was a hair on the body, between the neck and the cord, that we identified as belonging to Dr Stiles. I admit that derailed the investigation a little for a while. However, it must have come from Dr Stiles’s clothes, which Miss Moodie was wearing.’

  ‘Ah. Was she?’

  ‘Almost certainly, ma’am. We know that she was using Miss Stiles’s bag.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  This surprised Singh a bit. Of all the things to pick, the bag seemed the least likely detail. But the Queen appeared genuinely interested.

  ‘A cabin bag was taken from Dr Stiles’s flat that morning. It matched exactly the one Miss Moodie arrived with here at the castle. Judging from the shape and size, we believe it would have contained Dr Stiles’s papers for the meeting and her outfit for the evening drinks reception. It went missing afterwards, so we can’t be sure.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Queen nodded. ‘Yes. I see.’

  She had an odd look about her. Sharp. Thoughtful. He tried to be helpful. ‘The bag doesn’t play a very big part in the investigation, ma’am.’

  ‘No, I suppose it wouldn’t. Do please go on.’

  ‘Returning to the hair, I don’t think she put it there deliberately. She was careful to scrape Dr Stiles’s lipstick to remove the DNA. Then she covered it in Mr Brodsky’s fingerprints and left it near the body.’

  ‘As well as some pants, I seem to remember,’ the Queen added. ‘Where did those come from?’

  Another unusual detail to pick up on, but Singh remembered how adamant Gavin Humphreys had been about them belonging to her page. She must have been rather cross about that.

  ‘We think –’ Singh’s voice wavered slightly. ‘Um, from what was found in Dr Stiles’s bathroom at home . . . er, that she had been . . . um, menstruating, ma’am. And I understand ladies like to pack spare—’

  ‘Thank you, Commissioner. I see.’

  ‘And so Miss Moodie used them to try and make it look as if Mr Brodsky had died mid . . .’

  ‘Ye-es.’ The word had several syllables, and the Queen’s voice was weighed with melancholy. ‘Her old schoolfriend . . . A rather special young man. I danced with him.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Singh said.

  ‘Well, yes. So am I.’

  He wanted to lighten the mood, but he knew what was to come. ‘You might perhaps be wondering, ma’am, what Dr Stiles herself was doing all that time, while Miss Moodie was busy taking her place?’

  ‘Something like that,’ the Queen said, inscrutably.

  ‘We can discuss it another time if you like.’

  The Queen sighed deeply. ‘No. Tell me now.’

  Singh sensed a certain reluctance. She was probably tired, after last night. But it was almost as if she knew what was coming. ‘Well, by the time Sir Peter discovered the impersonation, Dr Stiles was already dead. We had assumed she must have been bribed or blackmailed into going along with the original deception, because after all, she never reported it. However, it turns out that nobody had seen her alive since the day before she officially came to Windsor. DCI Strong thought he had, when he went to her flat to interview her as a witness, but after Sir Peter’s revelation he realised it was Miss Moodie he had spoken to, not Dr Stiles.

  ‘So we looked at the CCTV footage outside her flat. The evening before the first meeting at the castle, it shows a tall, hooded man arriving. None of the other residents saw him in the building. We believe he entered Dr Stiles’s flat without her knowledge and slipped a knockout drug into something she was drinking.’

  ‘In my day, we used to call that a Mickey Finn,’ the Queen observed.

  ‘Yes, I think I’ve heard of those. In this case, it was almost certainly a tranquilliser called Rohypnol, sadly used in date . . . ahem . . . assault, ma’am. It lowers anxiety but can also cause the person taking it to forget what has happened. It can also make them feel pretty bad the next day. We think Dr Stiles was out of it that night, and in the morning she thought she’d caught a bug. She emailed her contact at the Belt and Road meeting saying as much, but there was another thing – GCHQ discovered that her emails had been hacked. You know about hacking, ma’am? I see
you do. She sent the email, but he never received it.

  ‘According to the CCTV, the hooded man was still inside. We think the plan had been to keep an eye on her while Miss Moodie was playing her part at the castle, but afterwards to let her recover from her woozy symptoms and go back to her normal life. The body soon metabolises Rohypnol from the bloodstream. Dr Stiles would have had confused memories, but otherwise she’d have been OK, physically at least. However, after Mr Brodsky’s death they changed their minds. It’s ironic, really. Miss Moodie did what she did to the body to stop Rachel Stiles hearing about the murder and telling someone she hadn’t been here that night. But that was never going to happen. Are you all right, ma’am?’

  ‘Quite all right, Commissioner. I might just have another cup of tea. Thank you very much.’ The Queen nodded to the footman as he poured it.

  Singh was worried. She was looking a bit grey, suddenly, and he hadn’t even got to the really nasty part. ‘So . . . and stop me if this is too much . . .’

  ‘No, please go on.’

  ‘Ma’am.’ He waited while she took a sip. ‘The intruder left Dr Stiles briefly, but soon returned. As they feared, we quickly suspected murder at the castle. We believe he kept her tranquillised in her bedroom until Anita Moodie could to do her bit in the living room when the police visited. But by now they were stuck. Strong’s team could come back at any time. They couldn’t keep Dr Stiles out of it indefinitely. Besides, it had already been three days. When she came to her senses, she would know it was more than a bug. She might remember at least some of what he’d done to her. So he waited. For three more days. We think he kept her drugged up while they used her email and social media to tell friends and work that she was under the weather. They wanted to leave a long enough gap that what happened next wouldn’t ever be connected to the castle. GCHQ pointed out that the hackers didn’t bother to divert the messages anymore. They knew Dr Stiles would never read or check them.’