Stealing the Crown (A Guy Harford Mystery)

by TP Fielden

  ‘Even if she might be upset by what she learns?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. Until I find out something, I won’t be able to judge.’

  Rupe had his eye on a trio of Spitfires streaking westwards across the London skyline. ‘Have you heard of Lady Easthampton?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Her husband is heir to Earl FitzMalcolm. Some friends of mine have had their eye on her.’

  ‘Friends in the Post Office?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘Been peeping through her letterbox?’

  ‘Oh, grow up. I’m just going out for a breath of fresh air now. You may find some useful bedtime reading in your room. See you later.’ Rupert swallowed the last of his whisky and wandered out.

  Guy refilled his glass and walked the few paces over to the small room containing a single bed, wardrobe, dressing table and little more. There were cracks in the ceiling from a recent bombing raid, and the window overlooking the bus station forecourt was streaked with dirt. The wallpaper had mostly faded from a startling orange to a more acceptable umber, but there was still evidence here and there of the original atrocity. For a moment Guy’s thoughts turned to the small house covered in bougainvillea, with its shaded courtyard and tinkling fountain, its light, airy studio, and the promise each day of another exquisite dawn.

  He turned away from the window to find on his bed an anonymous brown folder. Propping himself up on his pillows, he opened it to find a single sheet of paper – a carbon copy of what appeared to be an official report, but lacking attribution, signature, or identifying letterhead.

  He read:

  ZSUZANNA ‘SUZY’ GERTLER

  aka VISCOUNTESS EASTHAMPTON

  This person, born in Hungary but more recently domiciled in Poland, arrived in the UK on 4 July 1935.

  She appears to be the long-term mistress of Edward Stanislas Zeisloft, a Pole who made his fortune selling arms to both sides during the Spanish Civil War. Zeisloft was based in London but left at the outbreak of hostilities; his present whereabouts are unknown.

  Despite this regrettable alliance, since arriving in the UK Lady Easthampton has been on familiar terms* with the Soviet ambassador, on affectionate and intimate terms* with the Turkish ambassador and others, while one of her closest friendships* has been with Prince Habib Lotfallah, who has ambitions to become king of Syria. Other contacts include an army officer at the War Office and a cook employed by Randolph Churchill, son of the Prime Minister.

  Reports from our contact in Paris in early 1940 suggest that Zeisloft is either a German agent or double agent. He is very rich and has been providing Lady Easthampton with a considerable amount of money.

  Upon arrival in this country, Lady Easthampton, who is an attractive woman, quickly made her way into society circles, though it is not clear how she achieved this.

  She came to our attention because in 1937 she was heard to say she wanted to marry ‘a wealthy Englishman’ and encouraged Sir Hugo de Lys to propose marriage. However, she rejected his proposal because in the meantime she had become acquainted with the elder son of Earl FitzMalcolm.

  Ambrose Easthampton carries the courtesy title of Viscount Easthampton but, despite his background and education, is an undischarged bankrupt and dependent upon alcohol.

  It is understood their marriage in 1938 was one entirely of convenience. Lady Easthampton, or more correctly Zeisloft, paid Lord Easthampton £500 to secure the marriage, and he is now in receipt of a substantial allowance from them both.

  Lady Easthampton is a highly sophisticated woman, having engineered a place for herself in society in order to go about her principal business, which is spying for the arms trade.

  The Home Secretary has ordered that she be placed under close scrutiny in preparation for a detention order under Rule 18b.

  TOP SECRET CPW/OR

  RESTRICTED CIRCULATION 2/1941

  INITIAL AND RETURN pp. DHRTA

  A few moments later there was a tap on Guy’s door.

  ‘Better than A Book at Bedtime?’ smiled Rupe, nodding at the radio.

  ‘Interesting enough,’ agreed Guy, levering himself up. ‘I imagine there must be quite a few of these adventuresses hanging around London.’

  ‘None quite like this,’ said Rupe. ‘It’s easier to penetrate the British upper classes if you’re foreign, especially from a land where not many people have travelled. And being an outstanding beauty is no hindrance – she has a particular fondness for provocative necklines. No, what makes her different is the people she’s targeted, and why. She’s ruthless, cunning, colossally ambitious – exceptional.’

  ‘Just the kind of person in need of the tireless scrutiny of the Post Office.’

  ‘Very funny. Would you mind giving me that back now?’ Rupe reached out a hand.

  ‘Any more? I’m not ready for bed yet. A few more stories about London’s Mata Haris might put me in the mood for sleep.’

  ‘Oh Lord,’ said Rupe, taking back the folder, ‘I see the penny hasn’t dropped.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Why do you think I left this for you?’ said Rupe, shaking his head in wonderment. ‘Major Brampton. And Lady Easthampton. Do you get it now?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Guy. ‘Oh.’

  ‘You never read this.’ The door slammed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The windows on one side of Markham Street had blown out, yet oddly the houses themselves seemed untouched. As Guy walked gingerly up the street, his feet crunching and clanking the glass shards underfoot, he thought about his pledge to Adelaide Brampton. In the short time he’d known Ed he had not altogether enjoyed his company, and actually when he came to think about it there’d been too many intervening years for him to feel any close link with Adelaide either.

  Yet here he was, sticking his head in the lion’s jaws, stumbling into trouble, just when he should be concentrating on the job at hand and thanking his stars he’d escaped that dreary quotidian of the Foreign Office. Life at the Palace was decidedly peculiar, yet it had its own rationale, its own momentum, and the job everyone was doing there to keep up the nation’s morale was remarkable.

  The King, the Queen, and especially the young Princess Elizabeth shone like a beacon of hope in these dark days; and if others who sheltered behind the palace railings were less admirable, that was understandable: lordly, inflexible men they were, fearful of being projected into the real world. Guy had come from a place where life was rarely led by the rules, and if his eccentric contribution was a help to the war effort, who was he to complain?

  But why – crunch, crunch – were his feet taking him back to the scene of the crime? Did he even know what he hoped to achieve coming here this evening? Were those shadowy figures from the Coats Mission on his tail – and if they were tailing him, why?

  He looked over his shoulder but the street was almost deserted. The only people he could see were down the other end, absorbed in the business of sweeping up last night’s bomb damage. Someone looking out of a front-room window gave him an uninquisitive look, and a woman with her hair tied in a scarf walked past giving him a dazzling smile – hardly the action of an undercover agent, surely?

  He finally arrived at the Bramptons’ house. This side of the street remained untouched, such was the arbitrary effect of bomb blast – if you turned your back on the windowless terrace opposite, it was almost as if there was no war – the sky was bright, the air warm and still, the sparrows chirping in the gutters and chimney stacks.

  His thoughts returned to Rodie, her face ablaze with anger and humiliation. Where she comes from, he concluded, the nature of friendship is different. That night, in the dark, breaking into Ed’s house, had made them equals – all criminals together – so why shouldn’t they go dancing together, as everyone else did in these beleaguered times?

  But where Guy came from, friendship took longer to develop, longer for the barriers to fall. You never said outright what you thought about a
person, but gradually edged your way towards it. You did not say ‘You’re gorgeous’ or suggest after a first meeting that you should marry – it just wasn’t the way with the people he’d grown up with.

  And yet isn’t that why he loved the life of Tangier – even with its double-dealing, its hidden vices, its disregard for the conventions? Why shouldn’t Rodie say all those things?

  Because she breaks the law, he reminded himself. Because she lacks the capacity to tell right from wrong. Because she steals from people. Because she says, ‘When I want something I take it.’ He shuddered at the thought.

  He felt in his pocket. Just before her outburst Rodie had handed him, with some pride, a latchkey – ‘Just in case you want to go back,’ she’d teased. Being a bit of an expert, she’d managed to fix the jammed front-door lock and had a copy made. It was as if she’d given him a secret love-token instead of the illicit means to open Ed’s front door.

  ‘Where did this . . . ?’

  ‘Easy when you know how,’ and as she passed the key over her hand closed on his. ‘Don’t lose it, darling,’ she’d whispered.

  Guy glanced once more over his shoulder as he let himself into the house. When he’d broken in before he had no idea what he was looking for; now he had a clearer purpose. He walked through the front hall and was making his way towards Ed’s study at the back when he stopped in surprise. On the floor by the foot of the stairs leaned the portrait of Ed which Adelaide had painted when they were first married: cheeks bronzed by the sun, hair disarranged by the wind, a cream flannel shirt crumpled, the wounded soldier seated on a bench smiling up at his portraitist. It was a very different Ed to the one Guy had shared an office with.

  Distracted to find this memento of happier times so randomly abandoned, he wandered into the drawing room. A glance told him that Adelaide had been hard at work before returning to the country, removing photographs and the selection of pointless objects with which the English upper classes cover their polished surfaces. Previously this room had looked cluttered, now it looked almost bare – as if Rodie had come back and helped herself.

  And yet Guy knew this to be the work of Adelaide – the portrait told him that in an instant; no burglar worth his salt would give it a second look. Was she taking everything back to St Walke Episcopi, or was this the erasure of a husband of twelve years from her life?

  Guy shook his head and moved on through the house to Ed’s study. Unlike the denuded drawing room, it was in exactly the same state it had been when he, Rupe and Rodie had visited.

  I’ve become a criminal, he thought. I turned up my nose at dancing with a girl because she breaks into people’s houses, but am I any better?

  He pushed the thought to one side, glanced round the tiny room and pulled down some files from a shelf.

  Don’t get distracted, he told himself, you’re looking for one thing and one thing only – a single clue. But as he opened the top file to find a series of memos signed by Tommy Lascelles, he knew this was a job which could take a very long time.

  He shuffled through the carbon copies of replies and suddenly there was another tranche of memos, this time from Sir Topham Dighton. Quite what they were doing at Ed’s house when they should be under lock and key at the Palace, Guy could not fathom. Almost certainly they’d offer up information as to what Ed was doing clandestinely for his second master at the Palace – but this wasn’t what he was looking for.

  An hour later, as the air-raid sirens wound up to their nightly hysterical wail, the files had dwindled to a single unopened folder. Guy wandered into the drawing room and poured himself a whisky. He’d read his way through Ed’s domestic bills, the letters from his club, his regiment and his school, the correspondence with his wider family. The file he’d saved till last was a random collection of cards, letters, telegrams and other ephemera, which were clearly gathered together in this way because they were of the most significance, personally, to the dead man. Here, surely, was what he was looking for!

  But fifteen minutes later Guy was no wiser. He drained the whisky and made a decision – he’d have to take away the palace file, the one with memos from Lascelles and Dighton; it contained too much information to be absorbed while his adrenalin levels were running high and he was waiting any second to be discovered by the nosy colonel next door.

  Such an action was fraught with danger – if he was spotted as he made his escape, or got run over in the street, or any one of a number of other eventualities in the crazy possibilities of wartime night, he’d be found in possession of documents which should never have left Buckingham Palace. Questions would be asked about where and how he’d got them, which would almost certainly lead to the discovery that he’d broken into Ed’s house – not once, but twice. And that could quickly lead to accusations of him consorting with a known criminal – Rodie Carr, or whatever her name was – all of which would put an end to his life as a courtier and could well put him behind quite a different set of railings.

  He poured another whisky while he weighed up the options, his eye scanning the room while he thought. As a diversion he reached over to the bookcase to see what Ed’s reading habits were. Military history, obviously, was his preference, followed by the works of John Buchan, Conan Doyle, and Edgar Wallace. They summed up the mind of a man who was not Adelaide’s equal, war hero or not, Guy thought.

  Turning away, his eye fell on a volume of photographs by the Bauhaus artist Moholy-Nagy – not something Ed would have picked up at Foyles or Heywood Hill or wherever he shopped. Must be Adelaide’s, he thought.

  As he took the book from the shelf his trained eye took in the geometric art and surrealist photography which marked the author out as a pioneer of new thought and vision in art. As he leafed through, a large envelope dropped out and fell to the floor. Bending to pick it up, Guy felt from its thickness that inside were letters or notes – whatever they were, he thought, finally he’d found what he was looking for.

  ‘I had the strangest dream,’ said Foxy. ‘Buckingham Palace had been bombed – again – only this time the King did not survive.’

  ‘Happens all the time,’ said Guy. ‘You transfer your own anxieties on to the heads of others. You’re probably worried about Hugh.’

  They were lunching in Claridge’s, its wide marble floors as polished as in peacetime, the waiters perhaps less so; but even here the portions were small these days.

  ‘Oh, Hugh’s all right. Swanning around the House of Lords wearing his colonel’s uniform.’

  ‘You can send me an invitation to the wedding if you like.’

  ‘No, Guy, no. I don’t think Hugh wants the old Paris crowd there – you’re all a bit of a rabble, you know. And anyway, he’s not that keen on you. He says he saw something erotic in that portrait you painted.’

  ‘As intended. I didn’t realise he had such an artistic eye.’

  ‘Now, now, don’t be jealous!’

  ‘Let’s change the subject,’ said Guy crossly.

  ‘I was telling you about my dream. The King was dead, and there you were in the Throne Room wearing a Garter Sash, a chestful of medal ribbons, and with a flunkey waiting nearby to put the crown on your head.’

  ‘Were you my queen?’

  ‘Stop it. I could see behind you the Duke of Windsor, the Duke of Gloucester, the Duke of Kent – all the King’s brothers, ganging up like Brutus and his chums, ready to knife you in the back.’

  ‘Understandable in the circs. They have a greater claim to the throne than I.’

  ‘And then,’ said Foxy, not to be deflected, ‘something else happened. They all turned on each other and started stabbing each other furiously – blood everywhere, darling. It was horrible.’

  ‘Who won?’

  Foxy twisted in her seat crossly. ‘You’re not taking me seriously! They all wanted the throne, don’t you see? They were glad their brother was dead and they all wanted to assert their right to rule the Empire.’

  ‘Well,’ said Guy, ‘there may be some truth
in that. Of course I know nothing, but I listen closely to what Queen Aggie tells me – she may only be a clerk, but she knows everything.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Foxy. They had finished lunch and were waiting for coffee It looked like it was never going to come.

  ‘It goes like this. As the senior royal brother, Windsor wants to come back here to take up the crown if Bertie bites the dust. You more or less told me that yourself.’

  ‘But Princess Elizabeth . . .’

  ‘Too young to have any leverage.’

  ‘Even with that redoubtable mother behind her? You don’t know what power women can wield when they try!’

  ‘Pay attention. Gloucester – he’s the hidden danger. He hates the Duke of Windsor for umpteen different reasons and thinks that, having abdicated, he no longer has any reasonable claim. Harry Gloucester is officially the Regent Designate, and if King George dropped dead tomorrow, he’s the one who’d sit on the throne.’

  ‘Yes, you told me that. What about dear Prince George, sweet man? Surely he has no ambitions?’

  ‘There you’re wrong. At the time of the Abdication he was seriously considered for the throne if Bertie couldn’t face up to it – and you recall Bertie weeping on Queen Mary’s shoulder when he realised he’d have to be king. They did psychological tests on Bertie to see if he could withstand the strain – and they warned George that if he didn’t pass, he, George, would get the throne. Nobody wanted Harry Gloucester wandering around with a crown on his head.’

  ‘Man’s a buffoon,’ said Foxy, nodding.

  ‘Steady on – he did some heroic stuff in France at the beginning of the war. And he’s a soldierly type – just right for a nation at war.’

  ‘And in peacetime? King Ass-for-Brains?’

  ‘The trouble with you Americans, you believe everyone at the top of the tree has to be a genius. Sometimes we get by very well on much less.’

  ‘You were saying about Prince George.’

  ‘Well, he may look sweet and unassuming but he knows he’s king material. Did you hear that Poland secretly offered him their throne when the war’s over?’