A Three Dog Problem

by S. J. Bennett

  She was about to fetch her coat from the seat where she’d left it when she spotted a strawberry-blond head moving purposefully through the crowd.

  ‘Hey! You stayed. Sorry I’m late.’

  White teeth flashed in a sweetly lopsided smile. The equerry pulled in for the kiss-on-each-cheek that you could do in public without raising an eyebrow if you were posh. Rozie felt a whole new set of chemicals flood her body.

  He looked at the empty wine glass on the nearby table and assumed it was hers.

  ‘Fancy another?’

  She absolutely did.

  Chapter 36

  T

  his weekend there was no trip to Windsor. Instead, on Saturday evening, the family showed up en masse at the Albert Hall for the Festival of Remembrance. The Queen and Philip were accompanied by all the children, her cousins and William and Catherine. In fact, almost a full complement of royals except for Harry, who was otherwise engaged. The media were now obsessed by the absence of his new girlfriend at the rugby. Sure enough, whatever they did or didn’t do, the press would have their say.

  But the event at the Albert Hall was uplifting as always, though it marked the centenary of the Battle of the Somme and twenty-five years since the first Gulf War. There was a marvellous, moving piece to honour the ATA girls who had flown Spitfires to their bases during the war. The round auditorium was filled with uniformed serving personnel and veterans, who always sang with a lustiness particular to the armed services, she thought. It was always good to celebrate with the living.

  Tomorrow would be devoted to the dead.

  *

  Sunday dawned dull and overcast, with a bitter chill. Her mother would have called it ‘dreich’. Only the Scots could truly describe bad weather. Nevertheless, it brightened up in time for the Queen to lead the laying of the wreaths of poppies at the Cenotaph to mark Remembrance Day, in front of a silent crowd.

  The moment was bittersweet, because she and Sir Simon had discussed the proposal that this might be the last time she would perform this essential task in person. Charles could do a perfectly decent job of it for her, and really it wouldn’t do for an aged monarch to break a hip while stepping backwards on a multi level, rain-slicked stone platform in November. She understood the logistics – but her heart would always want to be there, doing the right thing, paying her respects as she was doing now.

  On the balcony at the Foreign Office, overlooking the ceremony, Camilla, Catherine and Sophie stood together, all in black. For them, as for the vast majority watching on TV today, or lining the street to see the parade – or not watching at all, perhaps – most of the wars and sacrifice they were remembering today were distant stories, or an old-fashioned news report. But for the Queen and for those lined up in Whitehall they were vivid, lived experience. Though she had always been kept safe, she had lost men she had loved: friends and uncles, and ultimately her father, who smoking and the stress of the war had driven to an early grave. She had grieved with wives and girlfriends, sons and daughters, and now husbands and boyfriends in the later wars. Every military life was given in her father’s service and then hers, and she never forgot it. Each one mattered. With so many gone, it was difficult to keep one’s eyes entirely dry.

  *

  The mood was still upon her later that afternoon, when the family had gone and the Palace was quiet again. She was on her way to change out of her black dress when her Private Secretary caught up with her.

  ‘I just wanted to let you know about the tunnels, ma’am,’ Sir Simon said. ‘The Keeper mentioned that the Duke had asked him to get them checked out. He wants you to know that Security went down to have a look and the door’s shut tight with an outsize rusty padlock. You’d need bolt cutters to open it. We have nothing to fear from Health and Safety.’

  ‘Isn’t that a relief?’

  She looked quizzically at the manila folder tucked under his arm.

  ‘I thought you might like to read this later.’ He held it out. ‘It’s the latest update from the chief inspector. I can leave it on your desk if you—’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll take it now.’

  ‘I’ve added today’s note at the top, ma’am.’ Sir Simon positively bristled with efficiency. ‘It makes very depressing reading.’

  ‘Oh? You’ve read it?’

  ‘Just a skim through, to keep myself up to speed. Strong’s sergeant has found more background on Mrs Harris. It seems she was always difficult, regularly getting into trouble and making bad decisions. She had a rough start in life, so perhaps that explains it. The chief inspector seems to think she might have written her own poison pen letters. Were you aware of that?’

  ‘I was, actually.’

  ‘I must say I find it hard to imagine, but he makes a good case for it. It’s all in the notes. I can summarise them, if you like.’

  ‘Thank you, Simon, but no. I’ll read them myself.’

  After he’d left, she permitted herself a little sigh of frustration. It was Rozie’s day off and he was trying to help. Sir Simon hadn’t got to be as good as he was without casting a critical eye over anything he deemed important. In this, she recognised a fellow spirit, but she didn’t like the thought of him rummaging around in Rozie’s files.

  The Queen continued up to her bedroom to change, but found herself increasingly absorbed by the note in the manila folder that now rested on her dressing table. This was the report on Cynthia she had been waiting for.

  DS Highgate’s findings were certainly upsetting, given what had happened in the end. Cynthia Butterfield and her mother had been abandoned by Cynthia’s father, who had set up with another woman when the girl was three. A second unhappy and possibly violent marriage had ended in divorce, and her mother had then lived as a bit of a recluse. Overcoming these early obstacles, the young Cynthia had left Brighton for Edinburgh, then London to study art history, and started a strong career.

  Sir Simon mentioned ‘bad decisions’. The report said that Cynthia’s work as a curator had come under scrutiny in the summer of 1986. The personnel notes were sparse, but it seemed she was accused of making ‘basic mistakes’. That summer, she had left the Royal Collection to join the Works Department. She was offered the job by Sidney Smirke, its head, now known to be occasionally violent, and a drunk. At that time, she became the only woman in a ‘very macho’ department and after a few months she transferred to Housekeeping.

  Sir Simon had drawn from all of this that Cynthia Harris was ‘difficult’. But the Queen thought of the date. The Gentileschis had been discovered in 1986. She could well imagine that Sholto Harvie did not want a keen assistant looking over his shoulder. He must have been responsible for pointing out those ‘basic mistakes’.

  Had Cynthia made any mistakes at all? the Queen wondered. Or had she simply been told she had, by a popular and dynamic senior member of staff? And if she protested her innocence, who would believe her?

  The thing was, where Sir Simon saw ‘difficulty’ and ‘trouble’, the Queen saw strength and perseverance in the face of increasingly unpleasant odds. DS Highgate had also conducted a recent interview with the person to whom she’d left all her personal possessions in her will. This woman – a Miss Helen Fisher – described a university room-mate who had become a friend for life. The Cynthia of those first days in London was confident and chic, basing her style on Louise Brooks, the dark-haired jazz age film star. She had loved to travel and had developed an abiding passion for great art. This was the character whose hopes had been dashed, her potential lost.

  Nevertheless, the enduring friendship between these two women rang out through the clipped report. The Queen made a mental note to get Lady Caroline to write to Miss Fisher and express her condolences. She had been told that Mrs Harris did not have any close family still living, but that didn’t mean that there was nobody to mourn her. Although it seemed there was nobody to mourn her here.

  *

  The Queen rose from her dressing table. Still wearing her black dress and with
Willow and the dorgis at her heels, she descended the little staircase to the ground floor of the North Wing, where a corridor led to the north-west pavilion and the swimming pool. The footman who stood guarding the entrance looked very surprised to see her, but quickly hid it. She was grateful for his presence, as she realised she had absolutely no idea what the door code would be. Philip, who swam regularly, would know it, presumably.

  ‘Your Majesty.’ The footman bowed slightly and let her in, preceded by the dogs.

  Beyond the tall, glass windows with their Georgian panes, the sky was dark, or as dark as central London ever got, bathed in its eerie orange street light glow. The pavilion itself was atmospherically lit with several spotlights just below the skylit roof, while inset bulbs under the water cast rippling reflections around the room. The dogs happily padded around on the tiles, but she called them to her. Their oblivious general curiosity seemed inappropriate somehow.

  It must have been just about there, near the door to the changing rooms towards the shallow end, that the body had lain all night.

  ‘Exsanguination.’

  The word had leaped out at her from the first police report. The process of the blood flowing out of the body. Enough to cause death. Her equerry had told her – because she asked – that it could take the loss of between half and two-thirds of a person’s blood to kill them. It was the sort of thing that soldiers knew. How heartening, in a way, that one could perhaps survive with only half one’s blood still in the body. But Cynthia Harris had not survived, of course.

  Standing here, in the rippling light, with the hum of the filter and the sloshes and plops of little waves, the Queen was aware that these were the last sights and sounds Cynthia had known before she lost consciousness. She felt the housekeeper’s presence, or rather her absence, very keenly.

  Memories came back to her in quick succession: the swish of chic, bobbed hair, once almost black, now faded to almost white; the harmonious composition of any room whenever she had finished with it, which nobody else could match; the flash of joy on her face – fully explained now – when a painting had been reframed at her suggestion and they had jointly surveyed the happy result on a guest room wall.

  The Queen felt a wave of sympathy for the woman. She was more convinced than ever of a different story to the one Sir Simon saw. This was not ‘difficult’. It was . . . there was a phrase for it. It was on the tip of her tongue. She called out to the footman:

  ‘What’s it called when an employer makes your job so unpleasant that you can’t do it?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘Constructive dismissal, ma’am.’

  ‘That’s it! Thank you.’

  There had been times in her reign when it felt as if the tabloid press were trying to do as much to her. But she was a queen, and Cynthia Harris was a curator. So why not simply get a different curatorial job elsewhere? The woman described by Miss Fisher adored her work.

  The Queen looked across to the spot where the body had lain. Instead of an embittered woman in late middle age, she saw the university graduate with no family support, who liked silent film stars and dreamed of rising up in the art world. She also saw the shadow of the young woman’s boss, Sholto. The Queen knew from her personal experience how charismatic he could be. If he had wanted to prevent Cynthia from getting another decent job, he could probably have done so. In the tight-knit London art world, the word of the Deputy Surveyor could make or break a young career.

  Why would he want to break it?

  It seemed harsh punishment if all he needed to do was get Cynthia out of the way while he had the fake Gentileschi copies made and spirited the four originals out of the building. She was increasingly certain that was what Sholto had done – rolling them up like carpets and simply driving them out of Stable Yard under everyone’s noses.

  She parked the thought of his treatment of his assistant. Sholto had never struck her as remotely vicious or vindictive. But then, of course, he had never struck her as criminal either. Yet Daniel Blake, the young conservator he had hired, had died. One couldn’t put anything past him, however eloquent he was on the subject of Leonardo da Vinci.

  With the dogs beside her, she walked along the pool’s edge to the patch of tiles where Mrs Harris had collapsed. Ignoring her protesting knee, she bent over to inspect the grouting. It was far from pristine after several years of wear, but it was impossible to make out specific stains any more. She assumed the Housekeeping team had been extra diligent with bleach. Still, the woman had bled to death here, all alone. The Queen said a little prayer for her, hoping she had lost consciousness quickly, at least, and had not been afraid.

  Sholto Harvie’s shadow seemed to haunt this place. Everything came back to him. Every note reinforced her theory – and yet he had not done it. He was not here. He wasn’t even in the country. If he had wanted to create a perfect alibi, he couldn’t have done a better job.

  The answer must lie in the Breakages Business – which Rozie had demonstrated so clearly was still going on. Who would have thought a chocolate bar wrapper would be such comprehensive proof of dark deeds underground?

  That wrapper now sat in a sealed envelope (she hoped it was sealed) in Rozie’s desk, in case they needed it. Meanwhile, there was no easy proof that the tunnels had been used. As she expected, they had acted fast to hide all trace of that secret hinge, and she couldn’t move against them until she was sure of her ground. The question still remained: who were they, exactly?

  She was working on it. Unless she found something soon, she would have to take her suspicions to the proper authorities.

  They think it was an accident, she said to the rippling shade on the tiles in front of her. But her original presentiment remained, that even if Cynthia had died alone, the exsanguination had not begun that way.

  Chapter 37

  T

  he following evening, Rozie felt much better. She was sitting in the billiards room of the Chelsea Arts Club, ignoring the half-hearted game going on nearby and focusing on the elegant woman who nursed a glass of champagne in front of her.

  Rozie had heard stories of the Chelsea Arts Club. She knew of its famous balls and secret garden and had pictured something posh and well upholstered, like Claridge’s perhaps. But it turned out that artists didn’t want Michelin stars, marble floors and silk furnishings – they wanted (and could afford) cheap wine, café tables and somewhere friendly to relax. The white walls were hung with paintings for sale. The rabbit warren of little rooms was full of people in jeans, lounging in armchairs or laughing over candlelit dinners. Rozie’s host, Eleanor Walker, was one of the smartest people there.

  Eleanor wore a silk shirt and lots of gold jewellery. She explained that a friend was a jewellery designer and ‘I simply love her stuff, can’t get enough of it’. There were rings on most of her fingers, her ears were adorned with punkish gold spikes, and three chunky necklaces were hung with charms. All of which surprised Rozie, because Eleanor was in her sixties. She had briefly been a model in her youth. That bit didn’t surprise Rozie at all.

  They were here to talk about Sholto Harvie. Eleanor was Lavinia Hawthorne-Hopwood’s aunt, and the artist had cheerfully put Rozie in touch with her yesterday. ‘Oh God yes, she knows all about Sholto. Get her drunk. She’s great company. And she’ll love an evening out.’

  They talked for ten minutes about the Palace and Rozie did her party trick of sounding entertaining while saying nothing of any value whatsoever. Eventually, she brought up the subject of the ex-Deputy Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. Her excuse was that she was helping to collect anecdotes for a book about the Royal Collection. Eleanor’s features re-arranged themselves from curious and delighted to something more wary and disdainful. They reminded Rozie of someone else for a minute, but she couldn’t think who.

  ‘Have you met Sholto?’ Eleanor asked.

  ‘Yes, I have,’ Rozie said. ‘I stayed with him, actually.’

  ‘You liked him?’

  ‘Very much.�
�

  ‘Of course you did!’ Eleanor’s smile was disarming, but knowing. ‘Everyone loves Sholto. He’s just so . . . lovable.’

  ‘Go on,’ Rozie said, cautiously. She sensed honesty and scorn. She wasn’t sure what to make of it.

  Eleanor rested her chin in a cupped hand and gazed at the bubbles rising in her glass. ‘He’s cultivated that image since childhood. You see, Sholto loves things. Beautiful things. He adores them. He covets them and cares for them and obsesses over them. He always did, even as a child. His mother always used to tell a story that at seven, he knew how to tell marble from alabaster.’

  ‘Is there a difference?’

  Eleanor laughed. ‘Lavinia could tell you. Anyway, his parents were moderately well off. They had enough money to send him to boarding school and of course, once he was at Shadwell’s he made sure to befriend anyone who had more than him. Sholto learned very fast that what rich people love, more than anything, is entertainment. Because, you see, they’re so terribly bored. If they’ve made the money, or inherited it, what else is there to do? So Sholto became the party piece, the clown. He knew everyone who mattered across three counties. He was a gossip and a flirt, especially with the mothers. They adored that, of course. He was witty and well read, could cook divinely and deworm a recalcitrant dog. By seventeen, he was the most wanted party guest in the South of England.’

  ‘Wasn’t that a good thing?’ Rozie asked.

  Eleanor’s face hardened. ‘No, it wasn’t. Because none of it was real. Sholto didn’t want friendship, he wanted access. Close proximity to your Gainsboroughs and your Fabergé and your daughters.’

  She eyed Rozie coolly across the table. Eleanor herself was all angles, high-cheeked and loose-limbed, dressed in faded, flared jeans and a man’s jacket over the shirt. Rozie felt slightly wrong-footed by her shrewd, appraising gaze.

  ‘I was in my last year at school,’ she said, ‘when I met Sholto at a London party and brought him down for the weekend. He was the same age as me: seventeen. I was the fourth child out of five and we lived in the grounds of my grandfather’s house. A stately home, I suppose you’d call it. I was shy and biddable and loved horses and dogs. I wasn’t sure what to do with boys. I was used to the look on my friends’ faces when they saw Booke Place for the first time – but Sholto took it to the extreme. He fell in love with the estate,’ she concluded with a shrug. ‘With the situation, the architecture and everything in it. Including me, because I happened to be in it. He was obsessed. He was also a kleptomaniac.’