Stealing the Crown (A Guy Harford Mystery)

by TP Fielden

  And here (pictured) she is with her big sister, both in their kilt skirts and woolly jackets, at Windsor. They lean on their garden hoes enjoying a well-earned break, for in their personal garden every particle of the work has been done by their own hands. They made the paths and rolled them; they found, carried, and placed the bricks and white ornamental stones. It is a bold weed which attempts to flourish here!

  Rochester lit a cigarette and, with the match still alight, contemplated setting fire to this last piece of unctuous drivel. He hated himself when he had to write something uplifting.

  The telephone rang.

  ‘Come to dinner. I have Edwina Mountbatten and Noël Coward,’ commanded Betsey Cody from her Grosvenor Square eyrie. ‘I expect there’ll be something for you to write.’

  Such invitations were manna from heaven.

  ‘Now, Ted,’ she went on without waiting for a response, ‘I want to talk to you about the Duke of Gloucester.’

  ‘No, Betsey! It’s impossible to find anything interesting to say about him. He’s . . .’

  ‘He’s doing nothing, Ted. He’s the Regent of this country, for pity’s sake, and he’s doing nothing.’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t possibly write that in my column for News Chronicle.’

  ‘He’s barely done a stroke of work this past year.’

  ‘It would never get in.’

  ‘Well then, how about a piece for the Boulevardier? Don’t you have space in your next column?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I do. Until now I’d contemplated telling your great nation how wonderful our two little princesses are, digging for victory in their kitchen garden at Windsor.’

  ‘Sweet. They are doing well. But seriously, one or two people I’ve spoken to recently are deeply disappointed by Harry Gloucester’s performance. When you compare him to his big brother the King and his younger brother . . .’

  ‘Your dear friend the Duke of Kent.’

  ‘Ha ha. But honestly . . .’

  ‘What’s he been up to?’

  ‘Nothing at all. Hanging about the Palace, getting in everybody’s way. Complaining. He occasionally goes off and shakes a few hands but he’s not pulling his weight.’

  ‘You’d like to see that in print?’ Ted Rochester didn’t always feel the need to ask further when his great benefactor suggested a paragraph or two. She was so well-connected her stories were never wrong and usually her tales turned out to have some purpose, even if Rochester couldn’t always see what it was. Betsey was a bit of a mystery, but only in a good way.

  ‘I’ll give you some details,’ she replied briskly. ‘Have you got a pencil?’

  They’d returned to her flat across the street. Because of the direct hit, virtually every ceiling in the street was fractured or had come down, windows were cracked and shattered, and every door lintel had shifted. Guy had to put his shoulder to the front door with some force to gain entry.

  ‘Leave it,’ said Suzy as he tried to shut it again. ‘Frankie downstairs usually sees to it.’

  Nothing could prepare Guy for the shock as he followed Suzy into her tiny first-floor sitting room. He’d seen the opulent place in Chesterfield Street which had been her home, he’d spent time in the Curzon Street flat. Each was crowded with closet upon closet of expensive couture clothes, while in the bedrooms every available surface was littered with discarded jewellery.

  Here, in Bellure Street, there was nothing. The room was tidy but lacking every comfort, the bedroom beyond was furnished with a single iron bed and a washstand.

  Two shabby chairs were placed by the window and Suzy motioned to Guy to sit. She went to stand by the fireplace.

  ‘It always ends like this,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You drown yourself in furs, you weigh yourself down with diamonds, you are chauffeur-driven from The Ritz to The Dorchester and back again, but it always ends like this. For everyone. In the end, there are no possessions except life, and even that can be taken away like that.’ She swivelled her marvellous eyes to left and right.

  ‘Tell me about your second husband. Lord Easthampton.’

  ‘They are a very ancient family but terribly flawed.’ She managed a light laugh. ‘Queen Victoria once said, “There are men, there are women, and then there are the FitzMalcolms” – meaning not quite human. Even back then it was recognised there was something wrong with them. Somehow, with Ambrose’s father, it skipped a generation – he’s sane and charming, got his head screwed on, as you English say. But Ambrose inherited the lot – the madness, the profligacy. He’s handsome enough, I grant you, and I thought when I married him I could possibly make a go of it.

  ‘Stani taught me that in life, if you want something you have to work for it. He said, “There is a castle, a vast estate in Scotland, as much money as you will ever need, a tiara and, when the time comes, a Coronation robe. One day you will be Countess and all the hurt and disappointment, all the things you have had to do all your life, will melt away.”

  ‘But, like he said, you have to work for it, and Ambrose Easthampton was the job I had to do. So I agreed, and we married, and I found him tolerable enough. But Stani paid him pocket money and he used it to go back to his drinking. It would have been better if we’d left him poor. After a few weeks Lord FitzMalcolm realised what was going on and offered me a room in his house in Cadogan Square. I told Ambrose it was me or the bottle, you can guess which one he chose, so I moved in with my father-in-law.’

  Guy raised his eyebrows in an unspoken question. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing like that. Though I did sometimes share a bed with him when he was cold – he’s eighty-seven, you know. Then Stani got me the flat in Chesterfield House.’

  ‘What happened to your real job,’ asked Guy. ‘Getting information to pass on to Zeisloft?’

  ‘That’s the ironic thing. I’d gone through with this absurd marriage so I could swing around town on the arm of a titled husband, using his family connections to open doors. Instead, every night he was drunk under the table and my new escort, my father-in-law, almost never left the house.’

  ‘But he took you to a party at Balmoral.’

  ‘That was different. He came to life at Castle Malcolm – and, of course, nobody turns down an invitation to Balmoral. And there I met poor Edgar.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I saw Edgar as my Ambrose-substitute. He was to all intents living a bachelor existence, he was well-connected, a lovely man, and in need of company.’

  ‘So . . . ?’

  Suzy came to sit next to him on the hard chair. ‘There was a knock on my door at Chesterfield House. That was pretty unusual – it’s almost impossible to get past the doorman.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Guy with feeling.

  ‘Two men, very menacing. They said they were coming in to empty the safe and if I valued my life, I’d disappear. They told me Stani had been arrested in a raid in Paris. If he was tortured he’d reveal where his secret papers were, and someone or other would be around soon to collect them. I’ve seen too much in my life not to know when there’s real danger, so I just walked past them out of the door and kept walking. I’d got my day-clothes on but no coat, no purse – I had to borrow some pennies from the doorman to telephone Edgar, and he came and rescued me.’

  ‘And took you to Curzon Street?’

  ‘You know, of course, that it’s the King’s safe house, with extra flats for the courtiers. The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester stayed there a few times after they got out of York House, and Edgar had a hand in getting it ready for them. They were in the big flat, and he was given the key to the staff flat. He knew that the building was almost never used, and when I said I had nowhere to go, and that my life was in danger, he suddenly became very heroic.’

  ‘So you stayed there together? I found out that he locked up his Chelsea house and walked away. Nobody at the Palace knew he’d switched addresses, they all assumed he was still going home every night.’

  Suzy fiddled
with the gas ring by the fireplace. ‘We can have some tea,’ she said. ‘I feel comfortable with you now. It was a shock your coming up behind me, like those men at the flat.’ She knelt with a match and started back as the ring ignited with a loud pop.

  As she got up, Guy said, ‘Please look at me.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did you kill Ed? Did you shoot him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look at me when you say that.’

  She stood perfectly still. ‘No,’ she said very slowly, ‘I didn’t kill him. How could I? Why should I? He was like a knight in shining armour to me! He was protective, he was kind, he was understanding. He thought my life had been terrible and that now everything would be all right.’

  ‘But how?’ asked Guy. ‘Did he mean that he was going to leave his wife for you?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that between us! He was comforted by my company. He was terribly upset when – is her name Adelaide? – left for the country without consulting him. I think he felt he’d somehow failed her, that she didn’t love him any more. Poor Edgar!’

  ‘So you both lived there for – what? – two, three months?’

  ‘Until he died. When I heard the news, I thought the people who were coming after me had decided to – how do you say it – pick him off as a warning, as a threat? They didn’t know where I was, because all those months I rarely left the building in daylight. But Edgar was always out and about – much easier to track him down and’ – she caught her breath – ‘put a bullet in his poor head.’

  ‘Why would they want to get you?’

  ‘If they had got . . . certain facts out of Stani . . . they would know I had a lot of information that would be useful to the Axis war effort.’

  ‘What sort of information?’

  ‘Mr Harford, you really don’t want to know.’ The way she looked at him told Guy he’d get no more from her on that. ‘So then I came here – left everything in Curzon Street just as I had at Chesterfield House. Came here with the clothes I stood up in – no money, no anything. I knew the priest here from the Anglo-Hungarian Society, and he found me this place. He is a saintly man.’

  Guy had finished his tea. He lit two cigarettes and gave one to Suzy.

  ‘So the Germans killed Ed,’ he suggested.

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘Someone working for the Germans.’

  ‘I didn’t say that either.’

  ‘Who then?’ asked Guy in exasperation. ‘I’ll be frank, I started out trying to find out who shot Ed because I thought it was the right thing to do – the high-ups too ashamed by an apparent suicide on royal premises to want to do anything about it. The police kept well back. A vaguely raised eyebrow here, a shrug of the shoulders there. Apart from one madman in the King’s personal bodyguard, nobody seems to care any more. I’ve chased lead after lead to track you down, and all for nothing. I believe you when you say you didn’t kill Ed – but if you don’t know who did it, how will I ever find out?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ said Suzy. ‘I’d be very surprised if the security at the Palace was so lax that someone could walk in without having the first clue where Edgar’s office was, locate it, shoot him, tidy things up to make it look like suicide, and make his escape without anyone being the wiser.’

  Guy got up in impatience. ‘So it had to be someone inside the Palace.’

  ‘You’re not much of a detective, are you?’

  Guy screwed up his face. ‘You never spoke a truer word! I am not a detective – never was, never wanted to be, never can be, never will be!’

  ‘I have some plum brandy – Pálinka – on that shelf. Pour us both a thimbleful.’

  Guy obeyed. The sweet, sharp spirit caught his breath and calmed him. He walked over to the window, eyeing the street beneath and a woman scrubbing her front doorstep in defiance of the devastation which surrounded her.

  ‘I just have to go over all this again. Maybe you can help. If it’s someone in the Palace, who? Could it be the clerk, Aggie? She’s tough. She’s from Glasgow, she could do it. Maybe she was sweet on him – she certainly knew about you, and might have been jealous.

  ‘Could it have been Adelaide? She’s been very cool about the whole death business – effectively told me her marriage was over, that she’d stopped loving Ed. But I’ve known her all her life, she wouldn’t – she couldn’t – do a thing like that.

  ‘Could it have been the Master of the Household? Ed was running all sorts of dangerous errands for him – if Topham Dighton was going to be found out, it would ruin him – he very well could turn to murder. Except that the old boy’s nearly eighty, and I can’t see him being spry enough to stick a gun against poor old Ed’s temple.

  ‘Beyond that it becomes unfathomable. There are many, many people behind those palace railings who are handy with a firearm and have access to one. If one single person was persuaded by an outside force that Ed had to go – for whatever reason – it could easily be done. It’s a huge place, like a small town, people buzzing about all over the place.’

  Suzy looked at him for a long moment. ‘I know nothing about detection,’ she said, ‘but in my life I’ve seen many strange things. Danger makes you cautious, but it makes you curious too. You constantly ask questions when you find yourself threatened – “Should I do this? What if they do that?” – and I’ve been doing that about Edgar, of course I have.

  ‘So I say this to you, Mr Courtier – stop looking for who killed Edgar and concentrate on who wanted him killed. And why!’

  As he walked home through the blackout, it slowly came to Guy that his life could be in as great a danger as Suzy’s. She, at least, knew her enemy – those Nazi agents who wanted the information she carried in her head, the information she’d gleaned from her high-rolling life, from the society people who’d so briefly been her friends.

  But Guy?

  I’ve done nothing wrong, he said to himself, yet somehow I’ve landed in a bear pit and I don’t know who’s coming to tear me apart. I’m occupying Ed Brampton’s office, searching for answers to his death, dabbling in things I don’t understand – am I next on the list for a bullet? And if so, who’s going to pull the trigger?

  His footsteps took him past the shambles which had been the driveway up to Paddington station. Much of the debris had been cleared away, but the smell from the landmine that had decimated the flank of the ornate building still hung sharp in the air. Behind the broken facade, life went on, the steam trains huffing and clanking and shrieking – a reassuring sound in normal times, but in this half-light sounding more like echoes from a cosmic torture chamber.

  Who is it, thought Guy – is it Rupe, whose movements are so secretive he could easily be working for the other side?

  Is it Topsy Dighton, the colonel-in-chief of a bunch of dangerous plotters against the state? Or Toby Broadbent, a trained killer, a bully and a man so patently without a conscience?

  Or is it someone else? And do I even know them?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  As usual, it was Aggie who gave Guy his marching orders for the day. Since it was the first time he’d attended the weekly Investiture, his role would be no more than that given to groomsmen at a wedding: stand at the door, bow slightly, hand out a printed sheet, and show the sometimes-bewildered guests to their seats. Repeat as required.

  The atmosphere in the Grand Hall was stuffy – the low ceiling and cramped seating took care of that – but the more usual venue upstairs had been declared out of bounds for the duration by Topsy Dighton. Frighteningly efficient at his job, the Master of the Household had timed the walk down the Grand Staircase with his gold half-hunter before declaring it would take an extra four minutes to get to the air-raid shelters if they continued to hold Investitures upstairs. ‘They’d all be dead,’ he judged, and the King, recalling the air attack which had done such damage to his beloved London residence, agreed.

  The room filled quickly with men and women, many still recovering from their woun
ds, some with their eyes bandaged and guided by loved ones, several in wheelchairs. The air smelt vaguely of medicament. Guy helped place the queue of recipients in order of precedence – ‘the bravest first,’ ordered Aggie – and soon their citations were being read out by the ancient Lord Chamberlain.

  At times the old boy’s voice wavered as he related in brief each act of heroism, and as Guy stood at the back of the scarlet and gilt room, he suddenly saw the point of it all. Like many who toiled within the royal compound he’d quickly acquired a jaded view of the whole royal apparatus, with its pyramid of courtiers intent upon self-aggrandisement and the raft of below-stairs servants all with an axe to grind; the internal politics of the Palace were easily a match for anything in Tudor times.

  But here in this ornate room the nation gave thanks to those who’d risked their lives and survived – the struggle, the pain, the suffering were now to be publicly acknowledged. And, thought Guy, there’s nobody else who can do this – when the King thanks you and bows his head to your sacrifice, it’s as if the entire British people are, in that same moment, right there in the room. Millions of them, all silently applauding.

  The ceremony lasted ninety minutes, and after seeing the guests out Guy walked back to his office, where Aggie, queen of all she surveyed, sat in waiting.

  ‘Did it go well?’

  ‘Astonishingly well. The King was superb, the arrangements went off like clockwork, those decorated were suitably impressed and flattered. All those heroes! It was extraordinarily moving – even old Topsy had his handkerchief out, dabbing at his nose.’

  ‘When you’re that old you get sentimental,’ said Aggie coldly. ‘You had a telephone call from Major Ed’s wife. Widow.’

  ‘Any message?’

  ‘She’s coming up to London and would like to see you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Guy settled at his desk and looked over the daily briefing. Yet to come was the pleasure of handing over King Haakon’s laundry, sorting out the various bills coming in for Ed Brampton’s funeral, and a moment with the head chef, Ronnie Aubrey, to arrange a small party for Mrs Ferguson, the Palace’s housekeeper, whose birthday it was. Later he would look in at the King’s air-raid shelter and make sure everything was shipshape.