Malice at the Palace (The Royal Spyness Series Book 9)

by Rhys Bowen

“She did,” I replied. There was an intake of breath. “She said she saw something going on under the archway, but I think it must have been Major Beauchamp-Chough with his torch when I brought him to see the body.” I looked up at them. “I can ask her again exactly what she saw, if you like, but she is rather an impressionable girl and has heard the stories about ghosts in the palace.”

  “Ghosts?” Chief Inspector Pelham looked amused.

  “Yes, apparently the palace has more than its fair share of ghosts,” I replied. I didn’t add that I had seen one of them.

  “That may be useful.” The men exchanged a glance.

  Sir Jeremy leaned toward me. “Lady Georgiana, I do hope that Major Beauchamp-Chough has impressed upon you the sticky situation in which we find ourselves. We are weeks away from a royal wedding. The eyes of the world are already on London. Photographers are crawling out of the woodwork. And now this young woman—rumored to have been a . . . well, rumored to be a close friend of the groom—is found dead a few yards from his future wife.”

  Detective Chief Inspector Pelham cleared his throat. “You can thank your lucky stars that you and the princess were out all evening at the palace,” he said, “otherwise suspicion could have fallen upon the bride. Jealously is a powerful motive.”

  “That is absurd,” I said angrily. “Have you met Princess Marina? She is not the type at all.”

  “Oh, I think most women have a streak of jealousy running through them.” The DCI gave the hint of a smirk. “More deadly than the male, isn’t that what they say?”

  “Then, as you say, it was lucky we both have a perfect alibi all evening,” I said calmly. “Has the time of death been established?”

  “An autopsy is being performed at this moment,” Sir Jeremy said. “Presumably we’ll be able to know whether it was murder or suicide.”

  “Suicide?” I said. “Why would anyone come to Kensington Palace to commit suicide?”

  “Suicide or even accidental death,” Sir Jeremy went on, looking across me at the other men. “I understand you were not acquainted with the young woman. So let me tell you she was known in fashionable circles as ‘the girl with the silver syringe.’ She was a drug addict: cocaine and morphine. So it’s possible she took her own life.”

  “And she came here to do it to punish Prince George for getting married,” Chief Inspector Pelham said, nodding agreement. “Killed herself while of unsound mind in a moment of despair.”

  I realized, as I looked from one to the other, that they were writing a plausible scenario, just in case word ever got out. Unstable Young Woman, Known Drug Addict, Kills Self at Royal Palace. They were determined to make this a suicide.

  “So you are not going to investigate this further?” I asked. “You’re already writing it off as a suicide?”

  “Of course not,” Chief Inspector Pelham said. “If it is proven to be murder then naturally we will investigate to the fullest. But let’s just hope she died of a mixture of drugs and booze, shall we?”

  And the three men nodded.

  “So nothing was found at the scene to indicate that someone else had been there with her?” I asked.

  “My men examined the scene thoroughly,” Chief Inspector Pelham said. “There was no sign of a struggle or of foul play. No obvious wounds on the body. The sequins on her dress were intact, so were the long strings of beads around her neck. They probably wouldn’t have lasted through any kind of assault. And surely someone in one of the apartments would have heard her scream if she had been attacked.”

  “I believe it was suggested that maybe she was killed elsewhere and her body was dumped here,” I said.

  “If she was murdered,” Chief Inspector Pelham said. “But then the sound of a motorcar in this private area behind the palace would have made somebody look out of a window.”

  “All this speculation is worthless at the moment. Let’s just wait for the autopsy results, shall we?” Sir Jeremy said. “Because if the results indicate murder we have the most difficult of tasks ahead of us, keeping the investigation entirely out of the public eye.” He turned to me. “The newspapers have been remarkably cooperative about turning a blind eye to royal scandals, but I don’t think they could be persuaded to stay mum about a murder. This is where you can be of help to us, Lady Georgiana. You are one of their inner circle. You can ask seemingly innocent questions.”

  “Their inner circle?” I asked in surprise. “Surely you don’t think that anyone connected with the royal family is involved?”

  “Of course not, but given the young woman’s tenuous connection . . .” He left the rest of the sentence hanging. “And there are the servants. I don’t want to raise any alarms by questioning any of them officially yet. You could find out if anyone here saw anything strange last night.” He got to his feet. “I know we can count on you. You did a stellar job for us last time. Absolutely stellar.”

  Detective Chief Inspector Pelham raised an eyebrow as if he found this hard to believe. “And we don’t need to impress upon you the complete need for discretion,” he said. “Not a word of this conversation is to go beyond these four walls. You do understand that, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll do anything I can to help you.”

  Sir Jeremy smiled. “We’re most grateful, Lady Georgiana. I told them we could count on you.”

  “How do I contact you?” I asked. “Or will you contact me when you need to?”

  I realized that he worked in one of those nebulous departments that the Home Office would probably deny even existed.

  “I’ve no doubt you can contact Sir Jeremy through me,” the major said.

  Sir Jeremy reached into his breast pocket and produced a card. “This is my private telephone number,” he said. “It doesn’t go via the usual sort of exchange.”

  I took it from him.

  “Actually I will be officially handling the investigation.” DCI Pelham cleared his throat.

  “Quite.” Sir Jeremy gave the major the briefest of glances that said clearly the policeman was not of our class, not one of us, but had to be tolerated at this stage.

  “We’ll be in touch, then,” Sir Jeremy said. “As soon as we know the autopsy results.”

  I was shown out of the room and crossed the courtyard in a bit of a daze.

  Chapter 12

  STILL NOVEMBER 5

  KENSINGTON PALACE

  It wasn’t until I was back in my own bedroom, sipping tea as I watched the maid lighting the fire, that the full implication of what I had agreed to do hit me. They had not ruled out the royal family and they wanted me to question them. If it was murder, clearly the whole family had a motive. An unstable girl, addicted to cocaine, who had once been Prince George’s mistress, could do incredible damage if she decided to sell her story to the newspapers. She would have to be silenced at all costs. But then I realized that the royal family would not do their own killing and anyone they detailed to do the dirty deed would have made sure that the body was found far, far away, if it was found at all. Preferably it would have been taken out to sea, or buried conveniently in a royal wood. Leaving it for all to see at Kensington Palace would be an act of profound stupidity.

  So it was therefore more likely that someone else had a reason to want Bobo Carrington dead and wanted to pin the murder on the royals. Like the three men in that room, I just hoped it would turn out to be suicide.

  I got up, ran myself a long bath in a tub big enough to float the royal yacht in and was already out and dressed by the time Queenie appeared, bleary-eyed and still trying to button her dress.

  “Blimey, you’re up early,” she said. “What’s happening today, then? You didn’t tell me you wanted me earlier than normal this morning.”

  “Don’t worry, Queenie, for once you’re not in the wrong,” I said. “I merely woke early and it seemed silly to stay in bed.”r />
  “Right, then. Do you want your breakfast brought up on a tray? I’ll go and fetch it for you.”

  “No, thank you. Remember I said that I didn’t want you wandering around the palace? I’ll have mine downstairs. You stay here and I’ll have someone bring up your breakfast to you.”

  “It’s like being a bloody prisoner in a cell,” she said.

  “I think it’s very nice to be waited on. You can pretend to be me for once.”

  “Well, make sure they put more than one slice of toast on the plate,” she said. “That supper last night wasn’t enough to feed a ruddy sparrow.”

  “You can hardly do up those buttons as it is,” I said, chuckling. “A few weeks of dieting won’t do you any harm.”

  “How am I supposed to keep up me strength then?” she asked. “It takes a lot of energy lugging your ruddy trunks up and down stairs all the time.”

  “You’ll survive,” I said. “Oh, and Queenie, about last night . . .”

  “Yes, miss?”

  I walked over to the window and looked down. Below me the cobblestones glistened in watery sunshine. I tried to picture where the body had lain. Could I have seen it from this window? If a motorcar had drawn up outside the building and dumped the body it wouldn’t have been seen from here. I looked at the wall opposite. There were not many windows looking onto this courtyard. The one at the far end must be the major’s bathroom. Apart from that only the ones at the back of Princess Louise’s suite.

  “You said you saw something last night. What exactly did you see?”

  “Do you mean them lights flashing around?”

  “No, you said you saw something white earlier in the evening. Was it a lady in white?”

  “I couldn’t tell, miss. It was right dark down there. I just saw this white thing, moving slowly across the courtyard. I couldn’t even tell if it was a person. It just sort of oozed across the cobblestones toward the arch.”

  “Oozed?”

  “Yeah. Or wafted. I couldn’t exactly tell. Not going in a straight line anyway. Not someone walking. All I can say is it moved slowly in a funny way—this blob of white. I can tell you I closed them curtains pretty quick.”

  “What time was this, Queenie?”

  “I couldn’t tell you, miss. I was sitting here, feeling bored, and I thought I heard a motorcar, so I pulled back the curtain and that’s when I saw it. I’m sure it was one of them ruddy ghosts. You should hear what the servants say about this place being haunted. There’s the man with no face, and the boy who jumps out at you and laughs. So now I come to think of it, I’m quite happy to stay up here. If I ran into one of them on the stairs I think I’d die of a heart attack.”

  “I don’t think ghosts can hurt us, Queenie. They are not solid flesh and blood.”

  “That’s as may be,” she said. “I ain’t going to give them a try.”

  I thought of Bobo’s sparkly white dress. It did appear that Queenie may or may not have seen her crossing the courtyard. If she had been tipsy or on drugs might she have staggered around, giving the impression of wafting, as Queenie put it. That was interesting. If true, then a motorcar had not pulled up and dumped her body, but she had been alive down below my window.

  I went down to see if breakfast might have been put out for us and found Countess Irmtraut already seated at the table, tucking into a plate piled high with food.

  “This I like. The English breakfast. It is most nourishing,” she said.

  “Yes, there’s nothing to beat a good English breakfast,” I replied, starting to help myself to kidneys and bacon. “Did you sleep well last night? I hope we didn’t wake you when we came home.”

  “I was still awake,” she said. “You do not think that I would fall asleep before the princess returned? She might have needed me. And the maid said that someone lost a piece of jewelry when you came out of the motorcar? Was it you or Princess Marina?”

  “It was I. But easily found again. The major had a flashlight and helped me find it.”

  “This is good.” She nodded.

  “Your room faces the outside of the palace,” I said. “You didn’t hear any vehicles drive up before we arrived home, did you?”

  “What kind of vehicles?” She was looking at me suspiciously, a kidney poised on her fork.

  “My maid said she heard a motorcar outside the front door and I wondered who it could have been.”

  “I heard nothing,” she said. “I ate my dinner alone in the dining room. And a terrible dinner it was too. They served me something called toad in the hole. Do you know this? Is not a toad some kind of frog? Me, I do not eat frogs. I am not French.”

  I tried not to laugh. “That’s just its name. Actually it’s only English sausages in a batter. You know—English bangers?”

  “Bangers?” Her eyebrows shot up. “They explode?”

  “Not usually.” I smiled. “I’m sorry you didn’t like the meal. It’s a favorite of mine but not served often in fashionable circles. More like nursery food.”

  “They think I am only worth serving nursery food.” Irmtraut sniffed. “I had this frog for dinner and then I sat alone and read until Marina returned. A very boring evening. I trust your dinner at the palace was more lively.”

  “Very pleasant, thank you. And the family has clearly taken to Princess Marina.”

  “This is good,” she said. “I hope she will be happy with the English prince. He has not the good reputation, so I have heard.”

  “He might have been a bit of a playboy,” I said cautiously. “But I’m sure he will settle down now and take his responsibilities seriously.”

  “A playboy? At what does he play?” she asked. “Does this mean like an actor in a play?”

  I smiled. “No, it means he likes to have a good time.”

  “Ah. This is what we heard,” she said. “I do not wish Marina to be disappointed in her choice.”

  “The king has just made Prince George the Duke of Kent,” I said. “That means that Marina will become Duchess of Kent upon her marriage.”

  “A duchess is of higher rank than a princess?” She echoed Marina’s question.

  “A royal duchess, yes. The title comes with property and income. Kings’ sons, other than the heir, are often made royal dukes in England.”

  “Ah, so this is good. I am pleased.” I think it was the first time I had seen her smile.

  I waited for Marina to appear and ask to be taken to fashionable shops, plays and even nightclubs. All outside of my sphere of experience. I sighed. If only Darcy were here, he’d know about such things. He had certainly lived enough of the playboy lifestyle. I wondered where he was and why he could never even drop me a postcard. Was this what married life would be like, with my husband away in unknown parts of the world and my never knowing when he would return home? And whatever he was doing, of course he couldn’t tell me. Annoying man!

  Then suddenly I had a brain wave. I did know someone who moved in fashionable circles and knew about boutiques and nightclubs. What’s more, she had my blue evening gown hanging in her wardrobe, thanks to Queenie. I’d go to collect the dress this minute and see if I could persuade Belinda to help me escort Marina around fashionable London.

  Now I felt much better. I told Irmtraut to tell the princess that I had to pay a call but would return soon to take her wherever she wanted to go. Then I put on my coat and hat and stepped out into a fine, brisk morning. There was no sign of any kind of police vehicle and the archway was deserted, with no indication that anything had ever happened there. I searched around, looking for any kind of clue that might have been missed, but rain-washed cobbles do not favor telltale footprints, or even the tread of motor tires.

  Then I set off across the park for Belinda’s Knightsbridge mews cottage. It was a grand day to be out and walking and I felt my spirits rise as they always did when I was in the ope
n air. Nannies pushed prams along the gravel paths while their older charges ran ahead or pushed their own dolls’ prams. It was a peaceful and friendly scene and it was hard to believe that a young woman had lain dead in an archway just on the other side of the palace. The men in the major’s study clearly wanted her death to be a suicide. I just hoped they were right and the autopsy would prove that she died from a drug overdose. But it still wouldn’t explain what she was doing under an archway at Kensington Palace.

  I hadn’t gone far before two young boys came barreling toward me, pushing a pram with a hideous stuffed figure in it. I leaped back, startled, before they yelled, “Penny for the Guy, miss!” And I realized the date. Guy Fawkes. Bonfire night. All over Britain bonfires would be lit in back gardens and fireworks would be set off. I fished in my purse and found a penny, then was accosted by two more lots of boys and Guys before I reached the entrance to the park.

  I rapped on Belinda’s front door. I had to wait quite a while and had almost given up when the door opened and a bleary-eyed Belinda peeked out.

  “Oh, Georgie, it’s you. What are you doing here at this ungodly hour?” she asked.

  “It’s nine thirty, Belinda. Most of the world is up and busy. Were you out gambling again late last night?”

  “No, but I haven’t quite got used to the difference in times between California and here. My body still thinks it’s on California time.”

  “I know. I had the same trouble when I first arrived home,” I said. “Aren’t you going to let me in?” Then a thought struck me. “Or are you perhaps entertaining some gentleman I should not meet?”

  “No, it’s just me. All alone,” she said. “Come on in. I’m afraid I haven’t made tea or coffee yet.”

  I stepped into a rather untidy sitting room. “Where is your maid, Belinda?” I asked. “Has she not come back into your service yet?”

  “Gone,” Belinda said. “Deserted me. Abandoned me in my hour of need, the rotter.”

  “Oh no.”

  She nodded. “Oh yes. I paid her wages for a month when I left England. And of course I was gone longer than a month so she ups and finds herself a new job. And listen to this—not as a maid, either. She took a course in typewriting and now she works in a typing pool where she has regular hours and weekends free, and she earns more money than I paid her.” She shook her head. “What are the lower classes coming to, Georgie?”