And suddenly it all came together. Who committed murder in Chelsea that night in March, and how, and almost certainly why. When you thought about it, it was obvious.
‘Ma’am?’
She looked round to find Bobo hovering in the inner doorway.
‘Shall I draw that bath for you now?’
The Queen shook her head. ‘I need to talk to someone first.’
She gave her instructions. It was time to come face to face with a murderer.
Chapter 58
Lady Lucie Seymour followed Bobo into the bedroom. She was already dressed for the dinner and ball in ice-blue silk trimmed with tiny glass beads and looked, as her husband had anticipated, magnificent.
She dropped into a curtsey and murmured ‘Your Majesty.’ Then she glanced up, puzzled. ‘You wanted to see me?’
‘I did,’ the Queen said. ‘Please sit down.’
Her name was Lucie, not Lucy, as the Queen had originally assumed. She had seen it written on the list of guests for this evening. She hadn’t realised the full impact of that spelling at the time, but now she knew.
She indicated two armchairs placed conveniently by the window, and chose one of them while her guest sat opposite her in the other. Bobo left them to it. The distant traffic honked and hooted far below.
‘Your dresser said it was about my sister,’ Lucie said. She shook her head. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have one.’
The Queen sighed deeply. ‘I’m very sorry. But I think you did.’
Daphne had been wrong in Balmoral, though she was on the right lines. The layout of the bodies hadn’t been misdirection: it was love.
She had anticipated that Lucie might lie about her family, and she wasn’t entirely sure what she would do at that point. Instead, she watched as a single tear appeared in the inner corner of her visitor’s right eye and made its way very slowly down her powdered face. At that moment, she seemed to turn from marble into something as fragile as an eggshell. Her voice was almost inaudible.
‘How did you know?’
The Queen held out a hand in a gesture of reassurance. One needed dogs at a moment like this, she thought. Even a horse would do, or in extremis a cat, though she was allergic to them. But the Waldorf Astoria didn’t have them on tap. She clasped Lucie’s cold fingers briefly with the warmth of her own.
‘I realised as I was trying on my tiara,’ she said. ‘Of course, you’d have tried yours on too. It’s impossible to get it right unless you’ve worked out how to wear your hair. You were going to wear it on your birthday, so Stephen gave it to you early so you could practise.’
Lucie nodded slightly. ‘Yes, he did.’
‘You had it out of the safe. But Ginette took it.’
Lucie just looked at her. Another tear followed the first.
‘You were very close to her,’ the Queen said quietly. ‘It suddenly occurred to me that if Ginette had an older sister in Marianne, there was nothing to say Marianne didn’t have an older sister too. One who helped Ginette out when she came to London.’
Lucie nodded, staring down at her skirts.
‘One she didn’t talk about.’ The Queen’s voice was gentle. ‘Perhaps because she didn’t want to embarrass her relative in high society.’
But this time Lucie shook her head. She stuck out her chin as she looked the Queen in the eye.
‘Because of what she did for a living, you mean? You don’t understand, ma’am. How do you think I met my husband?’
‘Ah,’ said the Queen, after a tiny pause. ‘I see.’
‘Stephen always likes to say we met in Geneva, but it was in Paris. And not at a diplomatic dinner party. That’s what gave Ginette the idea, la pauvre. Before the war, she wanted to be a milliner, like Marianne, not like me. Marianne was the talented one. She was friends with young Monsieur Dior, they wanted to work together, they both had such plans. She made hats for the Nazi wives during the Occupation and carried messages for the Resistance as she delivered them. And then . . .’
‘And then along came Jean-Pierre Minot.’
‘Yes.’ Lucie swallowed, but her gaze didn’t waver. ‘He was a star of the Gestapo by then. Marianne was taken to the Rue de la Pompe. They say he worked on her hands first. As soon as the war was over, I hurried home for news. I was hoping to find her alive, but of course I did not. I found out exactly what Jean-Pierre Minot had done – what Ginette already knew. He was famous in those days. Any woman in Paris would have killed him, but he’d vanished. After that, Ginette could never look at a hat. But she had such life, ma’am, despite it all. She wanted success. She saw my life in Westminster. She wanted to follow me and marry a rich man who wanted her. I told her that was only in fairy tales but . . .’ Lucie waved a gloved hand.
‘She had your example,’ the Queen suggested.
‘Not only mine. There are others. More than you might think.’
‘I’m learning fast.’
Lucie cracked a smile. ‘Not every duchess was a debutante. And so yes, I tried to help her whenever I could. I didn’t see her much, usually when she needed money. But she came to me that night to tell me she’d seen the man who tortured Marianne in the Rue de la Pompe. She was dressed in white, her hair had changed. She looked quite different – in her face, too. Her eyes, you know?’
The Queen listened quietly.
‘She said she knew him instantly,’ Lucie went on, ‘and she was going to watch him die. I told her not to be ridiculous. To my shame, I didn’t believe her. Not at all. We were talking in my bedroom so the servants wouldn’t hear us. I went to order a tisane from the kitchen to calm her down and talk sense into her, but when I came back, she wasn’t there.’
‘And nor was the tiara.’
Lucie gave a hollow laugh. ‘That was the first thing I saw. I was furious! Imagine! For half a minute, I cared about the diamonds she’d taken for her hair. I didn’t understand her plan. By the time I realised what she’d done, she was halfway there. I was frantic!’
The Queen gave her a freshly laundered handkerchief from her handbag.
‘Ginette was only a girl in the war,’ she suggested. ‘But you were not. You were in your mid-twenties at the time, yes?’
Lucie nodded.
‘My mother mentioned to me that you and your husband knew the Arisaig estate,’ the Queen explained. ‘That’s where SOE agents who went to France were trained in combat. I assumed your husband had been stationed there, but I now realise it was you, wasn’t it?’
Lucie nodded dumbly.
‘You spoke French as your mother tongue. Were you training to be an agent yourself? No?’
‘I helped to train them,’ Lucie said. ‘They needed women as well as men to practise combat with. I was a driver, but I did everything. I learned quickly.’
The Queen nodded to herself. ‘So you knew how to kill a man, but your sister didn’t.’
‘How did you guess Ginette was my sister?’ Lucie asked. ‘Even Stephen didn’t know for a long time. I’m certain he didn’t tell anyone.’
‘That’s why she wouldn’t see him,’ the Queen murmured, as much to herself as to Lucie. He presumably didn’t know of her relationship to his wife at the time he asked for her, but Ginette would have done. The Queen went on, ‘When I realised Minot’s killer was a woman, I doubted anyone but a mother or a sister would have done what you did, and you’re not old enough to be Ginette’s mother. You found out her plans for him, that she wanted to kill him that night. You couldn’t let that happen.’