‘But what about Tony?’ Joan asked. ‘He’s not an idiot.’
‘No, he isn’t. It surprises me very much. But perhaps if he thought he had even the faintest chance of succeeding . . . He too, is a man who seems very confident in his own abilities. With a little more justification.’
‘And he has a brother in the Private Office,’ Joan agreed. ‘I suppose that might help.’
‘There’s a small group called the Empire Club, or something like that,’ the Queen said. ‘I heard about it on a shooting weekend a couple of years ago. I’m going to find out more about it. I doubt the three of them would be acting alone.’
Joan frowned hard for a while. Then she threw her hands up. ‘What silly, dangerous people, if it’s true, ma’am. They’re opportunistic and incompetent. Hector . . . Major Ross . . . he thinks so too. They don’t stand a cat’s chance in hell of getting what they want. But they could do some real damage in the process.’
The Queen sighed. ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking. They could do harm, and all for nothing. Just because they’re hopeless doesn’t mean we mustn’t do everything we can to stop them.’
‘If you’re sure,’ Joan said, ‘shouldn’t you get rid of Jeremy now, before he does something worse than itching powder in your makeup?’
‘That would have been terrible, actually. But no. It’s all conjecture. We don’t have the letter from my uncle that you saw on his desk. As I said at the beginning, we still need proof. If we act without it, we’ll just drive them underground.’
‘Will you tell MI5?’
‘I think, in a way, you already have,’ the Queen said. Joan’s familiarity with “Hector” Ross had its uses. ‘Now I’m waiting for them to come and tell me.’
Chapter 52
Oblivious to the fallibilities of witnesses hidden in MI5’s Cresswell Place file, Darbishire checked the final wording of his latest report and put it in the basket for his secretary to type. The good news was that he finally had something useful for Her Majesty to read. The bad news was that Woolgar was more insufferable than ever. ‘I told you, sir! There was something between them. Not pie in the sky at all.’
The male victim at Cresswell Place turned out to be, not ‘Dino Perez’ or ‘Nico Rodriguez’ from Argentina, but a Frenchman named Jean-Pierre Minot. A small-time thief from a northern suburb of Paris who became a big-time collaborator and torturer for the Gestapo during the Occupation, working at a notorious apartment in the Rue de la Pompe.
Minot had a specialism involving internal doors and ropes that Darbishire wished he hadn’t read about, and now couldn’t get out of his head. He could handle death, he was good at it. But even he had his limits.
Young Minot was very popular with his Nazi comrades, and universally loathed in the rest of Paris. When Darbishire showed ‘Rodriguez’’s picture to his friend in the Sûreté, with the suggestion he might be Gestapo, it took them only a couple of days to come up with a match. It was a shock that he was French, not German. It also meant he was hated even more by his fellow countrymen, for what he did to them.
Minot had done the best he could in South America to disguise his appearance with black hair dye and some form of surgery to his nose. He had aged by over a decade, but the likeness was still strong enough. ‘Something in the eyes’, Beryl White had said. It was no surprise that Ginette Fleury had recognised him.
Ginette herself, however, remained elusive. Woolgar had managed to track the sister down to Ravensbrück camp, just outside Berlin, the largest camp for women in the German Reich. Marianne Fleury was taken there in 1944 on one of the last such trains out of Paris, and had died there eight weeks later, already severely weakened by what she had undergone at Minot’s hands.
In Paris, there was anecdotal evidence that she had been living with a teenage girl before her arrest, but the neighbours thought they came from Normandy and the records there were patchy. After all the bombs and fires, Darbishire wasn’t surprised.
His contact in Paris was still looking for confirmation of who the letter writer said she was. But in a way, it didn’t matter. Darbishire had just reinterviewed Rita Gollanz, who corroborated the story about Ginette’s real identity. The fact was that Gina Fonteyn, known to Rita as Ginette Fleury, claimed Marianne was killed by the Gestapo, and he had proof that this was true. And the killer – as good as dammit – was indeed the man who was found beside Ginette that night. She told Rita she was fifteen at the time Marianne was captured, so that would make her twenty-eight now, which Deedar agreed was about right for the body he examined. So far, everything suggested by the letter writer fitted. It was a story of revenge.
Darbishire didn’t mention the letter in his report. He referred to ‘new information’ and smoothly progressed to the work that he and Woolgar had done to verify it. They were responsible for finding the evidence, and that’s what mattered.
It still wasn’t clear what happened after Ginette Fleury and Jean-Pierre Minot met up in Cresswell Place. Woolgar’s theory about a jealous lover was obviously pure hokum, but now that they were on the right track, getting to the truth was only a question of time. The momentum was back in the investigation, which made this tired policeman very happy.
The only fly in the ointment – apart from Woolgar’s puppyish and unjustified self-congratulation – was the look that Chief Inspector Venables gave them both this morning, when Darbishire was being congratulated on cracking the true identities of the victims. There was a gleam in his eye that Darbishire didn’t like at all. It was something he would need to keep a careful eye on.
At Windsor for the weekend, Philip was in high spirits. They’d be off on their next royal tour in a fortnight. He loved Canada and was fascinated by America. His personal library was piled high with books about both nations and he was eagerly consulting friends who knew them well. They had even eaten hot dogs for supper one night. The Queen was not convinced, but Anne, who’d had them in the nursery, pleaded for them to be on the menu daily and tried to persuade the nanny to post one to Charles at boarding school.
Philip had persuaded the BBC to lend him an old television camera, so she could practise the speech she was going to give before she opened parliament in Ottawa. He’d set the contraption up in her study there without consulting her – the dogs hated it and one had pissed all over it, which said a lot – and it dominated the room like an alien creature. However, she had to admit, the more one got used to it, the easier it was to imagine talking into it ‘like a friend’, as everyone told her to. Philip said she still looked like a plank of wood, but willow now, rather than oak.
They were taking a short break between rehearsals.
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you something,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you once belong to something called the Empire Club?’
‘Hmm? D’you mean the Empire Society?’ he asked, unscrewing the camera lens and peering inside.
‘Possibly. The one run by the Duke of Maidstone.’
‘“Bonkers Bunny”. Yes. I joined for about ten minutes. Bunny invited me to shoot with them out at Enfield. The bag was good, but the guns were ghastly.’
He meant the people, not the weapons. ‘Who?’ she asked. ‘Stephen Seymour wasn’t one of them, was he?’
‘No, not that day. It’s men like old Robbie Suffolk and Quentin Fanshaw at the Bank of East India.’
‘Do you know why it’s called the Empire Society?’
‘Ha!’ he said. ‘I thought it was a joke, but they seem to have this idea that we still run the empire. Not sure where they’ve been the last thirty years. They like to bang on about the old days when their grandparents rode about on elephants. Might as well be back in the 1850s. They’re “frightfully grand, you know”,’ he said, mocking the upper-class accent of an older generation. One that hadn’t arrived as a family of refugees in a boat. ‘Grovellingly polite and hideously rude. They call me a Greek and you a Hun, when they think we’re not listening. Can’t abide ’em.’