‘I’m sure the police are working on that.’
A footman approached them, offering to replenish their drinks.
The Queen lifted her glass reflexively, but she was still looking at the chaise longue, and frowning now.
Daphne glanced over towards Philip, standing in a group of men all raucously laughing. Whatever the Queen was worried about, he either didn’t know or hid it well.
‘But William was really shockingly bad,’ the Queen muttered to herself.
‘I’m sorry, ma’am?’
The Queen turned to Daphne and gave her the full force of her open smile. ‘I’m repeating myself. Don’t worry, it’s nothing. Mis— what did you call it?’
‘Misdirection.’
‘What do you think really happened, Daphne?’
Daphne, whose own ideas had covered orgies, psychopaths, satanists and devotees of the Marquis de Sade, decided to share none of these with Her Majesty. She was trying to come up with something suitably anodyne when she realised the Queen wasn’t listening anyway. She was looking back at the chaise longue again, in a world of her own.
PART 3
A WOMAN OF EASY VIRTUE
Chapter 38
It wasn’t that the Queen didn’t trust the members of her own household: it was just a simple fact that it was possible for someone to listen in to conversations over the internal palace telephone system without the caller knowing. She assumed that the operators didn’t, but it wasn’t a chance worth taking, so she and Philip had worked out a sort of code between them (‘The Oaks’ meant ‘I need to talk to you urgently in private’ and ‘Pall Mall’ meant ‘I love you’ and . . . other things).
Now that she knew not to trust someone in her Private Office, the Queen needed a written code for working with Joan too. With her APS back in London, she couldn’t be absolutely sure that her written memos wouldn’t be read by someone else.
The answer hadn’t taken them long to come up with: private messages were included in instructions about frocks and gloves. Any of the men in moustaches would run a mile at the details of waist measurements and corsetry. The Queen handwrote her notes and put them in envelopes casually paper-clipped to a memo about her wardrobe, as if they contained scraps of fabric or suggestions for embroidery.
The note in front of her was difficult to write. Not because of the content, which was straightforward, but because it meant doing something she hadn’t done since she was a teenager – trusting someone outside her inner circle with her most personal thoughts about a crime and its possible solution. And when she was a teenager, that hadn’t gone to plan. Not at all. She had learned self-reliance the hard way.
It was talking to Daphne after the ridiculous game of Nebuchadnezzar that had made her change her mind this time. She carved out ten minutes before tackling the remains of her boxes after breakfast to put her thoughts on paper. If Joan wasn’t already helping her out with the matter of the sabotage, she didn’t know what she would have done. The next steps weren’t ones she could take for herself. Little girls, picturing one as Queen, often assumed one had infinite powers, and would be horrified, she judged, to discover how very much she could not do. Talking to prostitutes and their associates, to take one example. Questioning a police inquiry, for another. She could do it, but the consequences would be severe.
The thing about the sabotage of her state visits was that it was an act against her job. It was a job she had sworn to do for the rest of her life, in Westminster Abbey, surrounded by the great and the good and watched by millions on television and, more importantly, God, and nobody on earth could take it more seriously than she did.
But it was a job.
And this was different. Being used as an alibi in the case of the Chelsea murders was personal. If anything went wrong, it would affect her marriage . . . Her role as head of state, too, in consequence, but it went deeper than that. As she crafted each line, she was careful not to mention exactly why she was so concerned about what happened to the couple in Cresswell Place – but she was writing to Joan in part because her APS was the most perceptive, quick-thinking woman she knew right now, and it wouldn’t take her long to work it out.
It would be so much easier just to sit back, go for some lovely dog walks and picnics, and let Inspector Darbishire deal with this. But he wasn’t dealing with it. Or rather, he was making glacially slow progress. And why was he in charge of such a high-profile case at all? What about Chief Inspector Venables? The Queen hadn’t forgotten that Chelsea’s police division had failed to roll out its star.
With this in mind, she was struck by what Daphne had said about women and history, and by William being so shockingly bad at imitating Althea Gibson. Men were not good at telling women’s stories.
What if this was a woman’s story?
Darbishire was focusing on Nico Rodriguez. It was understandable, given his gambling, his dirty trading, his possible involvement with London gangs. But what about the girl? The poor ‘tart in the tiara’, laid out on the bed in her underwear? Having failed to prove that she was involved with Lord Seymour, who owned the diamonds in question, the inspector seemed to have lost interest in her. She had become a footnote.
The Queen found women endlessly interesting. She found women who dressed as princesses and were then murdered within walking distance of Buckingham Palace worthy of her full attention. Then there was the other thing Daphne had said about misdirection. There was something about the way Gina Fonteyn was lying on that bed that Darbishire hadn’t fully understood yet, she felt sure of it. She also knew that women talked to other women in ways they didn’t talk to men. If senior police officers could be female . . . just imagine what they might uncover. It was certainly a novel idea.
At last, she felt there was something she could do.
She wrote her list of instructions to Joan and knew she had taken one of the biggest risks of her reign so far. With a deep breath and a sense of purpose, she folded the note in half and slid it into its envelope, which she labelled ‘US and Canada accessories, etc.’, and put with the rest of her correspondence, to go to London that afternoon.
Chapter 39
Joan took the note out of its envelope while sitting on the lavatory in the ladies’ bathroom in the North Wing corridor. It was the once place she could be assured of privacy.
The first page was a discussion of gloves and covered buttons. The second, written in pencil in the same confident hand, was very different.
I trust the question of my first speech is progressing. We can talk about it further on my return.
In the meantime, I have a request. If you can’t do it, I will trust your decision. It is a matter that requires great diplomacy, but my concern is simple: I wish D. to make progress in Chelsea. Please can you find out more about the princess? I believe a woman’s touch may be required. Full privacy is essential.
There is also the matter of the Diana, as we discussed. I fear you might have been mistaken. Please rectify.
ER
Joan sat quietly for several minutes. On first reading, the note made no sense to her. It was written as if she knew exactly what the Queen would be talking about, but she certainly did not. Who was ‘D’? What about ‘Chelsea’? And which of the many, many princesses Joan had recently read about in the course of her new job was the Queen referring to? That was all odd enough, but the last lines were simply wrong. ‘Diana’ had never come up in their brief conversations. What was Joan supposed to be mistaken about?