‘Hamlet’. The Danish prince. Honestly.
The Queen had a headache. Despite one of her study windows being slightly open to let in the cool September air, she found it difficult to breathe. She didn’t know William Pinder, but she knew his sister Abigail, who was still considered a great catch at the age of twenty-seven. She was a lively, attractive, intelligent young woman – the only deb of her year to go to university – popular at polo matches and famously good at bridge.
‘Hamlet’ was inside the house until well after four in the morning. Like the dean’s, this house had two upstairs bedrooms and a living room downstairs. The living room had a window with thin curtains and one person was seen moving around behind them for a few hours, believed to be William Pinder. There was no sign of the other two.
The Queen’s head throbbed.
‘Hamlet’ left, alone, at 4.15 a.m., when he was picked up by a man later identified as Captain John Macbride of the Grenadier Guards in his E-type Jaguar. Abigail Pinder was seen tearfully waving him goodbye through the window.
What the report did not suggest at any point was that ‘Hamlet’ ever visited the dean’s house, two doors down. Perhaps he or William Pinder could have done so round the back, past the empty house, via the little yards these places had. But the report made no reference to it and the Queen remembered Darbishire’s note that the dog at number 41 hadn’t barked that night, suggesting that nobody had exited the house that way.
That was not what A4 were worried about. It was the simple fact of ‘Hamlet’s presence on this street for several hours, with the attractive blonde who was a close relative of a man they suspected of being a national traitor.
Which, quite honestly, was probably enough.
Even so, not all the Queen’s worst fears were realised – not that she had ever really articulated them to herself. She had never thought for an instant that her husband was directly involved with what happened at number 44, or even knowingly mixed up with anyone who was. And yet . . . the coincidence had preyed on her mind for six months. But perhaps that was all it was: coincidence.
She looked across at Constitution Hill and saw that the Life Guards had ridden out of sight. As her breath returned to normal and her headache abated slightly, she glanced round for the corgis, two of whom had been dozing in their baskets. She called them to her and spent a minute crouched at ground level, ruffling their warm coats.
Coincidence! Coincidences happen all the time. But what a strange accident of timing. ‘Hamlet’ arrived at number 42 less than ten minutes after the watchers had noticed the man who turned out to be ‘Nico Rodriguez’ being let into number 44.
The surveillance officers, as she suspected, had turned out to be the most important witnesses to the goings-on at the dean’s house that night. To Darbishire, these witnesses were the elusive ‘Gregsons’, who remained a question mark in his reports. There were in fact three of them – two young men and a young woman. They had been positioned in number 22, not number 23 as they suggested (they were also the mysterious ‘academics’), and they hadn’t been watching the dean’s house deliberately: they had simply recorded whatever they saw in the street, which at the time didn’t strike them as important or unusual.
What did strike them as very unusual indeed, however, was the arrival of ‘Hamlet’ that night, at the house they were watching, and they spent some time double-checking with each other that it was really him, and telephoning the planner from A1 to ask what to do.
It was easy to imagine that these people had wanted to be helpful a week later, when they realised a double murder had taken place and knew they might have important evidence to share. They had done so, but for the sake of national security they must have decided to get two of them to pretend to be a local couple, to place them in the conveniently unoccupied house next door, and to distract police attention away from what they were really up to. No wonder Inspector Darbishire had been frustrated when he tried to follow up with them.
It certainly was important evidence, the Queen thought, walking up and down her study now, thinking hard. It gave the precise times both victims entered the house and corroborated the alibis of the dean’s guests from the Artemis Club – who must have left the club together about half an hour after ‘Hamlet’ did. But the team didn’t seem to consider that for a crucial five or ten minutes, they hadn’t been concentrating.
Perhaps ‘Hamlet’s arrival was important after alclass="underline" he had inadvertently distracted the key witnesses.
If Darbishire could interview them properly, using whatever techniques the police were trained in these days, he might be able to get them to remember something they’d missed. But he wasn’t allowed anywhere near them.
She could see why. There was a lot of national security at stake in all sorts of different ways.
But murder was murder, and the secret of the report on her desk was that it was a muddle. It wasn’t good enough. She had to do something about it.
Chapter 50
Sir Hugh was intransigent.
‘I’m sorry, ma’am. We can’t.’
‘We must, Hugh.’
Her private secretary looked at her dolefully from behind his thick spectacles. ‘I admire your commitment to truth and justice, but I’m not sure you’ve fully understood the possible repercussions . . .’
‘It might be difficult for us, yes, but the police need to know—’
‘You do understand to whom “Hamlet” refers, ma’am?’
‘Of course I do!’ she said, irritably.
‘The news will leak. It always does. The Met police are the worst. Whatever the truth turns out to be, there will be rumours, there always are. People will say there’s no smoke without fire. You may never live it down.’
‘I’m sure he had his reasons for being there. Have you asked him?’
‘No, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Have you?’
There was a short silence.
‘Not in so many words,’ the Queen admitted. ‘But I raised it in Scotland. Before I knew where he’d gone.’
‘And did he explain himself?’
‘No.’
‘Ah. There we are.’
‘But—’
‘Ma’am, if I may say so, it’s better not to ask. Not to know. Your . . . ahem, “Hamlet” might be aware of that. If asked subsequently, we have plausible deniability. We—’
‘What on earth’s that, Hugh?’
‘Plausible deniability? It was developed by President Truman, ma’am, for covert operations. The idea is that if anyone asks awkward questions, you can honestly say you didn’t know.’
‘But I want to know!’
Her private secretary raised a hand. ‘Forgive me, ma’am. What you want and what’s good for the country are two different things. I think you might find that if you did know, you may wish you’d never asked.’
She regarded him bleakly. What would her grandmother think? What was dutiful and what was selfish? She no longer knew.
He took pity. ‘I’m not saying you would regret it, ma’am, but it’s possible you might. And that if we do nothing, this might all go away in time, and we’ll be grateful for stones unturned. You never know what you’ll find underneath them.’