Ginette had an older sister who worked in the Resistance, who was captured and tortured by the Nazis, and sent off to a concentration camp. Perhaps it was Ravensbrück, near Berlin. The Queen had heard of many Frenchwomen – and brave women from Great Britain too, sent by the Special Operations Executive to help the Resistance – who had suffered and died there.
What was it about Argentina? Something recent, something connected . . . something she had read not long ago. Then she remembered. It was a top secret memorandum from the Foreign Office, informing her that a senior Nazi officer was known to be living in Buenos Aires, and many others – quite possibly hundreds, or even thousands – were thought to have taken refuge in South America.
Could Rodriguez have been one of these men, who escaped across the Atlantic and reinvented himself?
There was something else . . . He liked to gamble in places like Monaco and Tangier, where French was a common language. Was he a Frenchman, perhaps? One who had worked for the Gestapo? That might explain how Ginette knew him.
If he had tortured Marianne Fleury, and if Ginette had somehow recognised him in London, her desire to see him, to be alone with him somewhere quiet, would make perfect sense.
She would have wanted to kill him.
Perhaps she had tried, and failed. Or did she succeed? Was she the one who used the garotte on him? Was she knifing him in the eye when somebody else came in and . . . what? What happened then? How did Ginette end up a victim too? The Queen couldn’t picture it. She was missing something important.
Anyway, all of this was absolute conjecture, made up of Ginette’s last known movements, her family history, Rodriguez’s reputation for physical violence, a face in the crowd, a secret memorandum in her red boxes and . . . little more.
As she had done in the limousine on the Place de la Concorde, the Queen reflected that she would seem quite unhinged if she shared this half-formed theory with any of the men in moustaches. They would think her mad, and interfering in ways that were quite possibly dangerous to the Constitution. They would want to know why she cared so much in the first place. It wasn’t as if she tried to solve every violent crime in London. And then they would wonder what else had gone on in Cresswell Place that night, and even though she didn’t exactly know herself, that was the last thing she wanted them to think about.
She needed to talk to Joan. And she needed to do it privately and face to face.
It was now the second week of September. They would be back in London in less than a fortnight, at which point Charles was going off to boarding school at Cheam, as his father had done. What a lucky boy, the Queen thought, to be surrounded by pals his own age, running about outside and learning Latin together, not stuck in a stuffy schoolroom, as she had been with her sister, and every heir to the throne before her. She would miss him terribly, and her heart ached at the thought. But then again, she and Philip were off on their next state visits soon, and wouldn’t he have more fun with his new friends than moping about the palace?
Once she’d safely delivered him, she could focus properly on the contents of this letter and decide what to do about it. Another week wouldn’t make much difference, would it, after all these months? She would have to be patient. Which, fortunately, was one of those things she was good at.
Meanwhile, there had been more to her original instructions to her APS. Had Joan understood the reference to Diana? It was rather recherché. Joan hadn’t mentioned any progress in that sensitive direction in her letter. As the Queen got up and dusted off her breeches, she wondered how she was getting on.
Chapter 42
Standing at the end of the little cobbled street, Joan could see why the Dean of Bath might have chosen Cresswell Place for his London pad. Given what had happened there, she had pictured the mews as somewhere gloomy and unsettling, but in the late summer sun, it looked like one of the jolliest streets in London.
The low rows of houses were the colours of sugared almonds, except for a few that were hung with red tiles. Joan liked the look of these the best. They were slightly larger than the others. One had a pair of new-ish windows set into its roof and, glancing up and shielding her eyes from the sun, she wondered who had put them there. For an instant, she thought she saw the figure of someone behind the glass, looking down on her. She realised she might seem rude for staring, and looked away.
She was here to see if she could make any more sense of the witness reports from the police file. The Queen had said she wanted ‘D’ to make progress in Chelsea. Having read the reports, which she had fished out of a cabinet in the Private Office filing room, Joan didn’t think that Inspector Darbishire was particularly slow. Nevertheless, he was stumped, and had been for months. Despite all the male victim’s nefarious activities, there was still no evidence of anyone entering the house other than the victims themselves, the dean and his friends; and Darbishire was still convinced none of them could have done it. Nor did he have a robust theory that threw a spotlight on Lord Seymour, or one of the London gangsters on his list.
Joan had the feeling of anyone coming fresh to an inquiry that her quick mind might solve the case. She looked for the house numbers. Number 44, the dean’s house, looked unremarkable but rather sad. The curtains were drawn at the dusty windows. A little bay tree in a pot outside was brown and dead. The dean, presumably, didn’t want to live there any more and the landlords must have decided not to try and find anyone else. Darbishire still hadn’t managed to find out who owned the building, exactly. He had the company name, but had made no progress on who owned the company.
Number 43, by contrast, was bright and clean, with open windows, fresh gingham curtains and a young rose plant being trained around the door. It had lain empty back in March, but it was cheerfully occupied now. To its right was the house where Mrs Pinder and her husband had been living. A witness further down the street had guessed that the supposed gunshot might have come from here, or the once empty house beside it.
Joan couldn’t tell if the Pinders were still in residence at number 42. A large Rover saloon was parked in front of it, obscuring much of the view. Darbishire’s report mentioned that there had been a falling-out with the academics who lived opposite at number 22, but gave no reason for it. Joan turned to see that this was the red-tiled house with the new-ish windows. The academics had left, according to the report, but someone was in there now. Meanwhile, the house to the right of that one, where the suspicious ‘Gregsons’ had lived, sat with windows and front door wide open. The ground floor had been gutted and a pair of plasterers were working on the inside, whistling loudly.
A low-slung Jaguar sports car came rumbling up the street and Joan stood out of the way to let it go by. She took one more look at all the houses, waiting to see if she could spot what the police had missed, but right now, the mews looked an impossible place for murder.
A walk around the nearby stucco villas of the Boltons taught her only that this was where she would want to live if she ever married a very, very rich man, and that it would be easy to escape from their gardens into the lovely square where she was standing via one of the side passages that ran from front to back.
Yes, getting away wouldn’t have been particularly difficult for whoever had done it. It was getting in that was the trouble.
Back at home, Joan considered her next task, which was to find out about what really happened at the Artemis Club. She felt disloyal doing it, but knew that the Queen wouldn’t have asked unless she was absolutely certain it needed to be done. Presumably, if Prince Philip hadn’t come home from the club when he claimed, the Queen must have known this for months. Joan had a strong feeling Her Majesty needed an innocent explanation. But what if she couldn’t provide one?