‘She’s a tart with good taste. And we know she’s not stupid. No fingerprints on the notepaper. And she can type.’ Woolgar nodded approvingly.
‘I give up,’ Darbishire sighed. He had been niggled by the Seymour incident because he had actually listened to his sergeant’s lurid fantasies, and now he felt a fool. ‘No, Woolgar, we don’t know she’s a tart. Your suggestion she has good taste is subjective. She might even be a “he”.’
‘Oh, no, sir,’ Woolgar said confidently. ‘Definitely a “she”. And what she says about DS Willis at the end, sir, well . . .’
His confidence was, in the inspector’s considered opinion, misplaced. For now, all they knew was that someone had written them a typed, anonymous, scented letter consisting of three short paragraphs, on the sort of cheap paper you can buy for half a shilling in Woolworths, and they’d posted it near the sorting office in Oxford Street, which means it could be any one of ten thousand people. (Darbishire gave Woolgar one thing: whoever it was wasn’t stupid.) And that person knew Gina Fonteyn.
Or Ginette Fleury, as he must now think of her. Everyone who spoke of her had been so confident that she was Italian. Darbishire served in Italy, and he recognised how different the languages were. It made him despair.
‘It may all be pie in the sky,’ he said, ‘but we can’t ignore it. I’ll contact my friend at the Sûreté, and see if they’ve got a record of Ginette and Marianne Fleury in Paris. If Marianne was captured and sent away, they should know about it. And if “Rodriguez” worked for the Gestapo, they might have a record of him.’
‘Bound to, sir.’
Darbishire tapped his pen on the letter. ‘Don’t forget, Sergeant. A critical eye.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Woolgar said, with a grin that made it clear he already believed all of it. ‘So they knew each other! Fleury and Rodriguez.’
He’d learned nothing. Absolutely nothing.
‘Perhaps they did.’
‘They could have been lovers, and he let her down. Or ran away, sir.’
‘She was fifteen at the time, according to this letter!’
Woolgar shrugged. ‘You never know.’
Darbishire had little girls at home and shuddered at the thought. ‘Surely if her sister was in the Resistance, it’s more likely that he betrayed them somehow? If anything, they were mortal enemies.’
Woolgar seemed pleased by this response. ‘You see? Not pie in the sky at all, sir. She killed him, and then one of his old mates came in somehow and found them there, and killed her.’
Darbishire leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. ‘And washed her, and laid her out all neatly? Because . . . ?’
‘Because he was secretly in love with her. Which is why he’d followed them there in the first place. To save her from herself. Or because he was jealous. Maybe both.’
Darbishire didn’t know that there was a comparison to be made between himself and Her Majesty, but he was less tolerant of his subordinate’s speculations than she was. He had learned his lesson. This sounded to him very much like romantic tosh.
‘Can I ask, Woolgar, are you a secret devotee of Mills & Boon? Georgette Heyer?’
‘I quite like Barbara Cartland, sir. My mother has a collection.’
‘It follows.’
‘Is that all, sir?’
‘No. You can get in touch with whoever has the archive for Ravensbrück concentration camp. No, I don’t know how. Just work it out.’
But Woolgar didn’t move.
‘Yes?’
‘Can I just ask, sir, are you going to do anything about what she said about DS Willis? About him scaring women, I mean. And touching them up and . . .’
‘No, Woolgar, I’m not.’
‘Right. Because you don’t believe her, or . . . ?’
‘Because that person, who may be male or female, has chosen to remain anonymous,’ Darbishire pointed out wearily. ‘Because they may well be lying, or have a private grudge. Because to the best of our knowledge, Willis is a highly regarded officer in the Met, with a spotless record, and I don’t want to be the one to tarnish it unless I’m absolutely, rock-solid certain that it’s fully deserved.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘If you tarnish one man, you tarnish us all, Woolgar.’
‘Right, sir.’
Privately, Darbishire thought he might in fact have a little word with DS Willis, let him know there had been talk. That should be enough to clear things up, he judged. Put the wind up the man if any wind, indeed, needed to be put. Darbishire had his doubts about a few senior people, but on the whole the officers of the Metropolitan Police were fine, upstanding men. He was proud to be one of them. It made him sad to think that DS Woolgar – the fan of trashy female fiction – might be so easily persuaded to imagine otherwise.
Chapter 49
The Queen closed the file on her desk, got up and walked to the window of her office. A detachment of the Life Guards was riding down Constitution Hill on glossy black horses. She observed the plumes of their helmets swaying in time to the horses’ tails without really taking them in.
Now she knew what she had long suspected, and everything was better, and worse.
According to the report from MI5, a team of officers from their surveillance department, known as A4, had indeed been watching a house in Cresswell Place on the night of the murders – just as Joan assumed. It wasn’t the dean’s house at number 44, but a place two doors down, rented by a certain William Pinder. He was a civil servant who worked for MI5 itself at a fairly senior level.
And possibly the Russians. That’s what they wanted to find out.
The Queen hadn’t known about this particular investigation. Usually they waited until they discovered something of note before telling her. The fact that they hadn’t done so for several months suggested this one wasn’t going well. It must still be active, if Joan was right that they had spotted her in the street ten days ago.
William Pinder was suspected of being the Third Man in the Cambridge spy ring, which had been uncovered so ignominiously after Burgess and Maclean fled to Moscow. Another man from MI6, Kim Philby, had also been accused of spying for the Russians. He had robustly and publicly denied it, but a cloud of suspicion still hung over him in some quarters.
Like her father, the Queen occasionally wondered whether she was harbouring yet another of them. More rumours swirled around her Surveyor of Pictures, Anthony Blunt. In his current role, he was well regarded as an expert on the Baroque. It was less well known that, as a British spy, he had done useful work for the family at the end of the war, when her uncle – now the Duke of Windsor – had created some awkward paperwork that needed to be retrieved in a hurry. Erudite and useful as Blunt was, the Queen still wasn’t sure about him. He had been a Cambridge man, too. If MI5 told her tomorrow that he was the Third Man, or the Fourth or Fifth, she wouldn’t be entirely surprised. However, they assured her at regular intervals that he wasn’t.
Perhaps it was this William Pinder. The team from A4 were particularly worried about him that night because he had been acting strangely. A footnote in the report referenced lateness at work, increased alcohol consumption and a ‘furtive attitude’. The Queen thought that being watched by your own employer might do that to a man, if he was good enough at his job to have caught them at it, but they thought he might be preparing to leave the country.
Instead, what happened that night was that shortly after eleven, an Aston Martin DB2 sports car drew up outside, driven by a man later identified as a gallerist and member of the Artemis Club called Roly Hill, who had beeped his horn once. The front door was opened by William Pinder’s sister Abigail, who was staying with him at the time, at which point a second man, referred to as ‘Hamlet’, got out of the car’s passenger seat and strode inside as quickly as he could. The sports car then drove off.