Their little family felt assailed from outside and within. The Queen had shared this with no one, of course, because even her darling mother couldn’t entirely be relied on to keep an absolute secret. She had hoped Darbishire would solve the case for her, but his latest report was thin, containing only minor updates about the male victim.
Rodriguez, as she now knew him, gambled at the Chamberlain in Tangier, which was interesting because it was a club favoured by the Duke of Maidstone, who had told her about the specialities of the girls at the Raffles agency. There was something about the names of the club and the agency that sparked a hint of a connection at the back of the Queen’s brain. But she couldn’t think of men more different than Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, a wealthy collector who worked for the East India Company, or even A.J. Raffles, the fictional and rather wonderful gentleman thief, and Neville Chamberlain, the unfortunate former prime minister.
Meanwhile, the report didn’t say anything about unusual visitors to Cresswell Place, or the gunshot – which the police seemed to have dismissed as a motorbike backfiring – or any of the aspects of the case she was most worried about.
She sat up late, in silence, thinking about it all, and the following morning, to Philip’s surprise, it was she, not the children, who was irritable.
Chapter 35
Joan returned to England after three weeks north of the border. Sir Hugh – who took his only holiday at Christmas – would remain at Balmoral for the full summer break, apart from occasional weekends when he stayed with friends who owned nearby estates. The other members of the Private Office took it in turns to be by the Queen’s side, alternating it with rare time with their families.
Relieved to have some freedom back again, Joan spent a happy few days with her father in Cambridge, racing him each morning to complete The Times crossword and punting to Grantchester with some of the graduate students, where they settled on the banks of the Cam with a bottle of squash and a box of buns from Fitzbillies on Trumpington Street.
She loved the timeless certainty of the old stone colleges. Often, first thing in the morning, before most people were about, it was possible to imagine she was living in the sixteenth century. In the evenings it wasn’t much different, the college fellows insisted on inviting her into the candlelit Senior Common Room for sherry, so they could try unsuccessfully to extract details about her new job.
Arriving in Buckingham Palace’s North Corridor on her first day back, she heard the sound of laughter coming from the secretaries’ shared office. It was Dilys Entwistle’s birthday and one of the others had brought in a cake. Joan noticed how they lowered the noise and looked guarded the moment she walked in.
‘Would you mind getting the press secretary, Miss McGraw?’ Dilys asked politely. ‘He never turns down a slice of Victoria sponge.’
Jeremy Radnor-Milne had come down from Scotland with her, when he had spent the long journey raging against Lord Altrincham and painting Her Majesty, like Mary Poppins, as practically perfect in every way. He thought any changes to her proposed speeches praising the Commonwealth were ‘doomed to failure’, but was grudgingly supportive of Sir Hugh’s idea of an ‘Elizabeth sponge’ competition, as long as it was done in such a way that it wasn’t disrespectful to her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.
Joan knocked on his office door and opened it in one smooth movement – a manoeuvre she had perfected over the last few months, hoping to catch him in the act of doing something underhand. He hated her for it, but was too polite to say so. She was happy to take advantage of his good manners.
‘Dilys is cutting her cake,’ she explained. ‘Why she’s doing it at this time in the morning, I don’t know, but she wants to know if you’d like a slice.’
Jeremy looked up from his desk with a rigid smile.
‘Oh, is she? How nice. I remember signing a card last week. She’s turning forty-five, I think . . . not that one should ever ask a woman her age. I suppose she’ll be retiring soon. I’ll meet you outside.’
He stood up without taking his eyes off Joan, made to close the file in front of him and changed his mind, leaving it open. She noticed how talkative he was being. He normally didn’t have much to say about the secretaries.
The rapid speech and the eye contact, the fixed expression . . . They were all signs Joan had seen before, during her work with the captured German officers. When somebody didn’t want you to know something, they often overcompensated. The more a prisoner smiled at her and held her eye, the more he fidgeted, the more she probed with her questions.
This time, Jeremy was clearly anxious for her not to look at his desk. He’d resisted looking at it himself, even when it would have been natural to.
At last – the door-opening ploy had finally worked. Joan just needed to know what she wasn’t supposed to see.
‘Oh my God! Was that a rat?’ she shrieked, staring at the wall behind him and pointing at the skirting under the window with a trembling finger.
Jeremy swivelled to look ‘Where?’
‘Gone behind the bookcase. It was enormous!’
‘I’m sure it’s a mouse, Joan. You must be used to them by now. Surely they had them in Bow?’
‘They did, but that was a monster!’
‘I didn’t see anything,’ he muttered, turning back to his desk. ‘And I haven’t heard scrabbling recently. You have a vivid imagination. Now, shall we go and say happy birthday? Only a small slice, I think. I need to watch my waistline.’
He accompanied her out of his room, pushing her gently into the corridor by the small of her back, locking the door behind him as he usually did, and pocketing the key.
In the few seconds while his back was turned, Joan had made a mental inventory of everything on his desktop. Only one thing stood out: a recently opened letter, beside the antique Moghul dagger he liked to use as a paper knife. The wording of the letter was suggestive. The image on its letterhead looked vaguely royal, but she hadn’t seen it before. Several people in the palace would probably be able to tell her what it was, but she didn’t dare risk sharing her question with any of them. There was only one person she could think of to ask.
Hector Ross had been away from the flat in Dolphin Square for a couple of days. Joan was relieved to see him back at the stove the evening of the sixteenth, doing something with eggs and butter.
‘I’m making an omelette. Would you like one?’ he asked.
‘Will there be enough?’ she asked.
‘Plenty. I brought half a dozen eggs back from the country. And I picked some herbs in the garden over the weekend. It’s an Italian recipe, to go with this wine.’
Joan looked at the bottle he indicated on the counter, which had Italian writing and a picture of a black cockerel on it. The wine itself was dark red in the glass Hector had poured for himself beside it. It looked inviting. She wondered if he had spent some of his war fighting up through Italy.
‘Thank you.’
She let him pour a glass for her and watched him at work. The timing of what she was about to say was good. It was always easier when you didn’t have to stare someone in the face.
‘By the way.’ She was as casual as could be. ‘I saw one of the secretaries in a flap about a letter recently. I only saw it from a distance, but I wondered who it might be from. She was terribly flustered by it.’
‘Oh?’ Hector paused to check the omelette he was finishing. It looked rich and golden. The sizzle and the smell were surprisingly good from such simple ingredients. ‘What did you see?’