However, it didn’t take long for her to switch into Bletchley mode. Don’t focus on what you don’t know, look at what leaps out at you. Joan let the words swim in front of her, and her mind relax. Her instinct soon told her that the first paragraph was in fact familiar. The ‘first speech’ must be the first one they had talked about together: the one that went missing in France. The Queen hoped Joan was making progress with the men in moustaches. Yes, she was.
The second was familiar too, though in a way that didn’t fit. She had never discussed Chelsea with the Queen, but it had been in the newspapers a lot recently. Could Her Majesty be referring to the murders? Surely, they weren’t connected to her? . . . But she had requested the police reports. Joan had overheard Sir Hugh expostulating to Miles Urquhart about them. She’s getting involved where she has no business to be. Sympathy for the lady victim, no doubt. Sometimes, I think we need to rescue her from her better nature.
The reports would be in the windowless office next to Sir Hugh’s, which contained several filing cabinets of sensitive documents and was always kept locked. Joan, as the ‘filing fairy’, as Urquhart had somewhat horrifically named her, was one of the few people with a key. Finding the documents would be the least of her problems. The latest updates would be missing, because the Queen would still have them in Balmoral, but Her Majesty knew that, and so must mean that Joan could get what she needed from the ones that were still in London.
After that, other details settled roughly into place. ‘D’ would make sense once she read the reports, presumably. Was that connected to ‘Diana’, below? Perhaps. The ‘princess’ might just be – and Joan realised it had been her very first thought, which she had automatically dismissed as too unlikely – the prostitute, or the ‘tart in the tiara’ as everyone called her. Newspaper speculation was that she might have been dressed as Grace Kelly, who was now Princess Grace of Monaco. Or perhaps just the fact of the diamonds made her look princess-like. The ‘woman’s touch’ might involve talking to her friends or fellow workers. And yes, Joan could imagine them talking more easily to a woman than a man.
All of this would be easy to prove or disprove once Joan unearthed the paperwork. But it didn’t help with those last lines.
Joan racked her brain, even though her memory was excellent and she knew she wasn’t missing anything. She and the Queen had never discussed a Diana – not in literature or art, nor as a friend or relative of Her Majesty, or of Joan herself. They might easily have done in any of those guises, which was why she felt Her Majesty was clever to use it. If asked, Joan could make up a dozen false explanations without thinking. But they had not done so. She couldn’t have been mistaken about something that never came up.
And why ‘the Diana’, and not just ‘Diana’? Nothing in this note was accidental.
Joan closed her eyes and trusted to her subconscious again, but this time, it had nothing to offer.
Never mind. She tucked the note into her handbag, refreshed her lipstick in the mirror at the basins and went back to her office. On the way, she paused at the low bookshelf in the corridor containing a full, leatherbound set of the latest Encyclopaedia Britannica. She picked out the volume ‘DAMASCUS TO EDUC’ and took it with her. Once back at her desk, she flipped to the page on ‘Diana’ and skimmed through the entries.
It didn’t take long.
One of the descriptions ran ‘in the Roman religion, goddess of wild animals and the hunt, identified with the Greek goddess Artemis’.
There it was. The Artemis Club had been in the newspapers a lot recently. It was regularly mentioned in the Private Office. That would explain the ‘the’ before the name. But she and the Queen had never discussed the Artemis Club either. That was Prince Philip’s domain. He attended often, the newspapers liked to speculate what he and his friends did there, and he had even been there the night of the . . .
Oh God.
He had been there the night of the Chelsea murders, as had the suspects in the case. But he had come back to the palace before the murders were committed. That was what the papers said.
Oh God, oh God.
She wasn’t mistaken. They were.
Joan watched as her skin formed goosebumps. This would call for more than the ‘diplomacy’ the Queen had so lightly mentioned. It was as delicate and dangerous as anything she had done at Bletchley.
She was terrified at the level of trust and responsibility.
And her body thrilled with it.
Chapter 40
The woman in the black silk cocktail dress and matching opera coat looked as if she would be more at home in Mayfair than the run-down streets behind Clapham Common in South London. She was looking for one of the Victorian houses that had long since been converted into flats. When she found the right number, she negotiated the cracked basement steps carefully in her patent heels, dodging the coal sacks and the line of empty milk bottles by the bottom door. She rapped on the knocker and waited.
Eventually, it was opened by a younger blonde, with the bone structure of a movie star and her hair in curlers. She was in the middle of doing her makeup: one lid a perfect cat’s eye, the other bare.
The visitor smiled politely. ‘Are you Beryl? Beryl White?’
‘Who’s asking?’
‘I’m here on behalf of a friend.’
The blonde looked the other woman up and down. ‘Oh, you are, are you? Anyway, she’s out. Can I take a message?’
The woman in black knew that she was talking to Beryl herself. The other woman’s inability to lie convincingly had been noted. ‘It’s about Gina,’ she said.
Beryl went rigid with fear and suspicion.
‘Look,’ she said, catching her breath, ‘I don’t know anything about anything, OK? I haven’t talked – I know how to keep my mouth shut.’ She made to shut the door. ‘So, whoever you’re from, you can put that in your pipe and smoke it.’
The woman in black planted her patent shoe firmly inside the door frame. She talked fast and low.
‘I’m not from whoever you think. In the press, everywhere, Gina’s just been “the tart in the tiara”. I think she deserves more, don’t you? I know she does. This . . . person I’m working with thinks they can help. It can’t bring her back, but it might get justice for her.’
Beryl kept up the pressure on the door. ‘Gina’s dead. There’s no justice for girls like her.’
‘Like us,’ the woman in black said. She held Beryl’s gaze.
Beryl seemed surprised and looked her up and down. Suspicion turned to curiosity.
‘Well, there’s no accounting for taste.’
‘I assure you, I work in the highest circles.’
‘Do you, now? So, your “friend” was a friend of Gina’s, too?’ she asked.
‘Like I say, I have friends in high places. So did she.’
The door opened a fraction wider. ‘Come in.’
Joan walked down the small, cold, dark corridor behind Beryl with a mixture of pride and irony. If Tony Radnor-Milne could take her for a woman of easy virtue, then so, it seemed, could one of the star escorts of the Raffles agency. It had its uses.
The flat smelled of damp and fried bacon. They passed a tiny kitchenette that wasn’t much more than a gas ring and a cupboard, and a dining area piled high with boxes and lined with racks of hanging clothes. After these, when Beryl opened the door to the room at the back, it reminded Joan of the attic in A Little Princess.