A Three Dog Problem

by S. J. Bennett

  See what you find, the Queen had said. Rozie leaned in a little further. ‘Oh?’

  ‘He started off with small things: mementos of his stay. My mother was cross when a silver ashtray disappeared during his first weekend. They all assumed it had been misplaced by a cleaning lady, but I found it in Sholto’s jacket pocket weeks later. There was a rather exquisite silver hummingbird that my grandfather had brought back from Geneva years before. A Fabergé egg. This was two years later. By now I was working in a little art gallery in Mayfair and Sholto was studying art at the Courtauld. He’d taken my virginity and I’d assumed wedding bells, though nothing was said. It was all very bohemian. He cooked me supper, very well, on two gas rings in his student flat. I found the bird and the egg when I was looking in his handkerchief drawer for something to use as napkins. Later, I discovered he’d also taken a portrait of my mother. At least, it disappeared that Christmas, and where else would it have gone?’

  Rozie remembered a beautiful picture of a pale young woman – all angles, too – in a fifties evening dress, that hung in his dining room. Was it a sign of what was to come?

  ‘He tried to take me, too.’ Eleanor leaned back in her chair, examining her strong hands, adorned with little rings. ‘I was madly in love. He knew what my parents thought of him and made plans to run off with me to Gretna Green and marry me the day he graduated from art school. I thought it was the most romantic thing in the world. Like an idiot, I told my younger brother, and of course he told my mother. Sholto came from what my parents called “trade” – which meant his father was a doctor and his mother’s family were engineers. They bought their own furniture; Sholto needed to work for a living. Of course I didn’t care – I loved that. Salt of the earth. I thought I was a socialist, but I was just a dupe. Sholto wanted beautiful things, and I was one of them. But my grandfather bought him off with a thousand pounds. He’d been prepared to go much higher.’

  ‘Did they know about the bird and the egg?’ Rozie asked, to try and take the sting out of the ‘thousand pounds’.

  ‘And the portrait? No, I didn’t tell them. They were being so snobbish. But it wasn’t only that. Once they heard about Sholto’s plan, my grandfather paid a detective to find out more about him. Of course, they didn’t tell me at the time. Sholto loved to hang out with disreputable people. Aristocrats in the West End, drug dealers in the East End. Pimps. Petty criminals. He liked them. It was the seventies and art school was all about rebellion. He didn’t take the drugs, but he liked the danger. I think he thought it made him cool. Anyway, it didn’t make him a perfect suitor. I thought it was my grandfather who broke my heart, but . . .’ She made a dismissive gesture with her beringed fingers to suggest she didn’t think so now.

  ‘Did he stay in touch?’ Rozie asked.

  ‘Of course he didn’t. He bought a Ducati, slept with two of my friends and went off to India with Lydia Munro, whose family weren’t as clued up as mine. He gave her crabs – God knows where he picked them up – and came back solo. I always wondered what would happen to him.’ Eleanor drained her glass, her stacked diamond rings flashing in the light. ‘Bizarrely, he stayed in touch with my brother for a while. Rupert was too polite to shun him, and Sholto was too crude to stay away. I assumed he’d end up in prison, but he worked for the Queen and retired to the Cotswolds. I saw his cottage in House & Garden. I must say, I searched the pictures for the bird and the egg, but I didn’t find them. Did you?’

  ‘I didn’t see them,’ Rozie said truthfully, keeping quiet about the portrait. ‘And what about his time at the Royal Collection?’ she asked, aware of her cover story.

  ‘Oh, you didn’t come here to ask me about that, did you?’ Eleanor smiled her disbelief. ‘What the hell would I know about that? Don’t worry, I don’t mind. I assume he stole the family silver. The Queen should count herself lucky he didn’t run off with Princess Margaret. I bet he tried.’

  Standing in Old Church Street afterwards, waiting for a cab, Rozie suddenly remembered who Eleanor had reminded her of, the moment she brought up Sholto: it was Lulu Arantes, who must have heard about him from Uncle Max. Lulu had been spot on about Cynthia Harris. She really ought to trust her more.

  Chapter 38

  B

  illy MacLachlan, too, had been busy. Back from Tetbury, he had visited one or two of his stomping grounds as a young detective, and reinserted himself into his old world as a royal protection officer. There were several networks for ex-royal servants, and for professional purposes Billy had kept up with more of them than he might have done otherwise – being a man very happy with a book and a crossword, most of the time. But he occasionally still golfed with ex-butlers, drank with ex-footmen, fished with ghillies and wine-tasted with sommeliers. They were in various stages of health and decrepitude, but they all had one thing in common: a love of gossip. There was a big pre-Christmas party at the Palace for old retainers coming up soon. On the pretext of making plans for this booze-up, Billy got to work.

  After two days of nosing around, he finished his report for the Boss. He delivered it to the Queen and Rozie together as they all took a tour of the gardens at lunchtime. He sensed the Queen was getting antsy. She’d actually called him yesterday to ask about progress, which wasn’t something she normally did.

  ‘Do you know what a fence is, ma’am?’ he asked, as they headed towards the lake.

  The Queen looked slightly bewildered. She glanced at the wall beside Constitution Hill and then away again. ‘I’m not sure I—’

  ‘Oh, right, sorry. I mean, in the criminal sense.’

  ‘Ah. I see. Isn’t that someone who handles stolen goods?’

  ‘On the nose, ma’am!’ he beamed. ‘Well then, you’re with me. I’ve been talking to a man by the name of Frank in Bethnal Green. He has an interesting tale to tell. My suggestion that a few Palace items might have been half-inched in years gone by came as no surprise to him.’

  The Queen looked resigned. ‘I see. People can’t help themselves. Or rather, they can. Guests have stolen our loo rolls, you know. Quite prestigious ones. Guests, I mean. I’m not sure you can have prestigious loo rolls.’

  ‘They’ve stolen a lot more than that,’ MacLachlan said. ‘Of course, it’s nothing new. You know about William Fortnum in the eighteenth century?’

  ‘The man who started Fortnum & Mason? Who was a footman for Queen Anne?’

  ‘Yes, him.’

  ‘Indeed I do,’ she said, smiling at the name. ‘A very enterprising man. He started off selling half-used Palace candles to the ladies-in-waiting. You can see his point. The queen liked fresh ones to be lit each day and there were thousands. It must have seemed a pity to waste them.’

  ‘He was quite the salesman,’ MacLachlan agreed. ‘And it worked out OK.’ He was picturing the store that stood seven storeys high on a corner of Piccadilly, with its lavish windows and a musical clock his little granddaughter was very fond of. ‘The thing is, Fortnum wasn’t alone. The palaces have always produced their entrepreneurs, shall we say. Some more savoury than others. So . . . The Breakages Business. Sir James suggested there might have been a little racket going on in the eighties as a one-off thing. But I know it was still going in the nineteen nineties for sure, when a man called Theodore Vesty was running it, and there’s no reason it couldn’t have kept going after that. It’s all rumour – nothing you could bring charges for. As I understand it, it worked two ways. There was the simple version, which was just smuggling things out that wouldn’t be missed: old curtains that were being upgraded, a small proportion of the baby clothes that got sent every time someone got pregnant. Never a large proportion, ma’am – that was the thing. Nothing to raise eyebrows unduly. Nothing to make nervous underlings go to the authorities.’

  ‘Hmm.’ The Queen nodded grimly.

  Rozie remembered the similar way Sholto Harvie had described the Breakages Business to her.

  ‘Palace records were duly adjusted,’ MacLachlan went on. ‘They fenced the
goods through people like my mate Frank. But I also looked into that Whitehall mandarin you told me about at the MOD, the one with the corner office – Roger Fox, his name was. He was a procurement manager in the eighties and early nineties who took early retirement for his health. That was the official story, but unofficially they caught him with his hand in the cookie jar. He was a crook through and through, basically. He may well have helped them out with finding willing buyers, no questions asked. He knew Vesty and, more to the point, Vesty’s predecessor, Sidney Smirke, was his brother-in-law.’

  ‘What?’ The Queen stopped in her tracks.

  ‘I thought you might be interested, ma’am. A nice little family business. Not hard to imagine your little picture going walkies from his storerooms to Fox’s office, if it wasn’t properly labelled during the refurbishment. The thing is, if it was usually hanging outside your bedroom, in your private apartments, I’m guessing most of the men in the Works Department wouldn’t have seen it there so it wouldn’t ring any bells. They must have assumed it was just general decoration and fair game. So it wasn’t handed over to the Royal Collection and was miraculously “lost”. That was the way they usually worked it, but only with things that didn’t matter. That time they made a mistake.’

  ‘Cynthia Harris would have known about it,’ the Queen said.

  ‘Even if she was with Sidney at the time, I doubt she was in on it. This was very much all the queen’s men, ma’am. Sidney didn’t tolerate women and she left soon after. But she might have guessed what must have happened if Rozie had had the chance to ask her. And it wasn’t just you being defrauded, ma’am,’ MacLachlan went on. ‘Suppliers were, too. In a different scam, they were forced to resupply goods that were delivered but never officially received. It’s hard to argue with Buckingham Palace. I mean, it can be done, but they’d have picked on small suppliers who wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘They used my name to threaten and defraud people?’

  ‘Er, yes, pretty much. It took a fine network to pull it off and I’m guessing that when they didn’t have everyone in place, they didn’t run it. You need two or three people who are responsible for taking in deliveries and signing them off. At least one of them has to be fairly high up. Another needs to be fairly junior, so it looks normal for him to be carting stuff down to the cellars, where the tunnel starts, so it can be spirited away. And obviously you need someone at St James’s Palace to receive the goods and get them out. Smuggling stuff in to the palaces would be pretty tough with all the security checks. Smuggling out? A child could do it, as long as it wouldn’t be missed.’

  ‘But what about receipts and invoices?’ Rozie asked. ‘There would be a paperwork trail. Someone in Finance would notice.’

  ‘Which is why you need accomplices there too. You pay them off. They look away. If you poke about a bit, I’m told there’s been an odd history of managers in the accounting team that looks after the property side over the last few years. They come and go. Some leave after hardly any time. I’m guessing the honest ones are put under pressure to move on. Maybe they’re accused of something, or their lives are made difficult.’

  ‘Constructive dismissal . . .’ the Queen said thoughtfully.

  ‘That’s it, ma’am. You keep the ones you can manipulate, shift the ones you can’t. Theo Vesty was a popular man in his day. He could get someone in with a good word, I imagine, and get them out again just as easy.’

  ‘Was it an accountant who killed Mrs Harris?’ the Queen wondered aloud. One never thought of accountants as being murderous types. Perhaps one should.

  Rozie was thinking furiously. ‘I was down there! In their office, the day we finalised the Reservicing Programme. That’s the team you’re talking about, Billy. There are four of them, but only two were there at the time, along with Mick Clements and his sidekick from Operations. They were celebrating and I ruined it. I was asking about some of the assumptions built into the financing model and—’

  She looked from one face to the other. Not everyone found Excel spreadsheet modelling as compelling as she did.

  ‘Sorry. Carry on, Billy. But I know who you mean. I think they thought they’d got away with something.’

  ‘And you were announcing they hadn’t?’ MacLachlan asked.

  ‘Without meaning to.’

  ‘I bet their little scam was worth thousands, or would have been.’

  ‘Ultimately, millions. And it was Mary van Renen who spotted it first. Perhaps they were onto her. It would certainly be enough to give them a motive to keep Cynthia quiet, if she had the slightest suspicion.’

  MacLachlan nodded. ‘Worth checking where they were the night she died. Do accountants ever sleep in the Palace?’

  ‘I can’t imagine why they would,’ the Queen remarked.

  ‘I’d look into it myself,’ he began. ‘Security keep a record. But I don’t want to stick my head above the parapet, ma’am.’

  She nodded in agreement. ‘Thanks for your discretion, Billy. I’d rather you stayed out of this. I know Chief Inspector Strong made a list of overnight guests that night. It’s in the file, isn’t it, Rozie?’

  ‘It is,’ Rozie confirmed.

  ‘There are a couple of porters you might want to check too,’ MacLachlan added to Rozie. ‘I’ll give you their names. I can’t see them being criminal masterminds, but they’ve been spending more lavishly than their pay packets suggest. Watches, phones, the odd new car . . .’

  ‘Stop that!’ the Queen commanded, her voice ringing with authority. Candy emerged from a bush, looking apologetic. The Queen turned back to MacLachlan. ‘I’m so sorry. Do go on. You were talking about criminal masterminds.’

  He shrugged. ‘Hopefully Strong’s list will help narrow things down. There’s those we’ve mentioned – Clements, the accountants and the porters – none of whom I’d put in that category at first glance. Plus maybe a security officer or two, though I’m afraid I can’t give you names.’

  ‘Oh?’ The Queen turned her sharp, blue gaze on him, frowning.

  ‘Yeah. Bit weird. Came from some gossip on the golf course. One of the old boys, ex-soldier, said he’d been having a drink with some of the current lads at the pub after work – someone’s birthday – and they got on to battlefield injuries. Not in the best of taste, ma’am, but I asked about it for the sake of duty, you know.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ she agreed.

  ‘Apparently a big group of them sat round and it got gory. They were egging each other on, sharing ugly ways to die. Quick ways, slow ways. One or two seemed to have encyclopedic knowledge. Ankle-slashing came into it.’

  ‘And not one of them thought to mention it? When somebody actually died that way in the north-west pavilion?’

  ‘This was after Mrs Harris died, ma’am. It sounded like the manner of her death inspired the conversation. Sadly, my contact couldn’t remember who said what because there was a big group and he didn’t know everyone. It certainly didn’t make anyone suspicious.’

  ‘Cynthia Harris had nobody to fight her corner,’ the Queen mused. ‘And if her death was deliberate, I suppose anyone might assume that it had been orchestrated by Mrs Moore, who had reason to hate her the most. She hardly strikes one as an ankle-slasher. Arabella Moore is very popular, I understand.’

  ‘Very much so,’ Rozie agreed.

  ‘We don’t like to think of our heroes as being villains, after all.’

  ‘Could she have done it?’ MacLachlan asked. He had no problem thinking of heroes as villains or vice versa. He knew some women who would make excellent ankle-slashers.

  ‘No,’ the Queen said. ‘When DCI Strong drew up his list, I distinctly remember him telling me that Mrs Moore was at home with her family that night. He checked, because she was a suspect for the poison pen letters. Her husband and three children can all vouch for her. By the way, did you manage to talk to Spike Milligan about the notes, Rozie? Could he shed any light on the affair?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, ma’am,’ Rozie s
aid. ‘I mean, I managed to speak to him, but he swore he didn’t know what I was talking about. The poor man looked terrified.’

  ‘Of you?’

  ‘Partly.’

  ‘You can be rather frightening.’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am. I was trying. But he was more worried about something else. I didn’t scare him into saying anything useful. He was definitely lying to me, but I had nothing specific to accuse him of. I said he’d been overheard, but I couldn’t exactly say who by.’

  ‘Who did overhear him?’ MacLachlan asked.

  ‘We don’t need to talk about that right now,’ the Queen said briskly. ‘How irritating.’ She paused, thinking.

  Rozie said, ‘So for now, we come back to Mick Clements.’ She was remembering the murderous look in the man’s eye when he found her in the cellars. He would have gone for her, she was fairly certain, if Eric Ferguson hadn’t pulled him back.

  ‘We do,’ the Queen said. ‘And he was one of the people who sent you on a wild goose chase in the summer, wasn’t he, Rozie?’

  She nodded. ‘By sending me off to the old manager with dementia, yes.’

  ‘Because you had started pulling on a thread,’ the Queen continued. For a moment, it all made sense. But then it didn’t. At worst, Mrs Harris might have told Rozie about the crimes of the nineteen eighties – if she even knew, for which they had no proof – but surely Clements could have distanced himself from those? He might have tried to threaten her into silence, but to go to all the effort and risk of actually killing her? He was impulsive – Rozie had seen that. Was that all it took? Could he have got away with it if it was?