A Death in Diamonds

Besides, there were those forty-five minutes to account for between Perez’s arrival at number 44 to join Miss Fonteyn, and Moreton’s return from the Artemis Club with his friends at a quarter to midnight. Darbishire really didn’t think the tart and her client had spent them playing cards, or talking philosophy. They were together here at eleven, and almost certainly dead by eleven thirty. Killed by persons unknown. Who teleported, like something out of H. G. Wells.

Woolgar pocketed his notebook and they headed back outside, into the pink light of a spring evening. Darbishire rolled his shoulders, glad to be in the fresh air. He wondered about the main witness that night: the young woman in the mews house opposite, up all night with her baby, who saw the comings and goings of Perez and Fonteyn, the dean and his guests. Her statement fitted in with the reports of taxi drivers and the suspects themselves, so she wasn’t making it up. But she didn’t see the men who must have done it. She had been interviewed by one of the sergeants and was very helpful at the time. Obviously, given her importance, Darbishire needed a personal word and soon, but like Beryl, the missing tart, she seemed to have gone to ground.

Once again, he wandered down to the end of the street, to get a sense of the yards behind the houses and their relationship to the gardens of the grand villas beyond. They were separated from each other by a motley collection of sturdy walls and flimsy wooden fence panels. The killers may have escaped across a series of yards until they were further down the street, but it seemed more likely they went straight over the ivy-covered wall of number 44 into the garden behind. Some of the ivy roots had been pulled away and a couple of crushed shrubs the other side of the wall were vaguely suggestive of a heavy landing, although the damage could equally have been made by a large animal. It hadn’t rained, and there were no telling footprints in the earth. There never were.

‘Off home, sir?’ Woolgar asked.

Darbishire nodded. He lived only a couple of streets away, in a nice new block of flats purpose-built for the police on one of the few local bomb sites, a couple of years ago. This area had been miraculously spared by the Blitz – as if the golden denizens of the nearby stucco villas had been protected by the Luftwaffe themselves. There had been some tragedies, of course, and some empty sites, even now, like missing teeth. But mostly it was a place of Edwardian mansion flats and cheap hotels, of large Victorian houses, churches and schools, all muddling along comfortably together between the medley of shops along the King’s Road to one side, and bedsits of the Old Brompton Road to the other.

Darbishire liked it round here. He liked to keep it tidy. He didn’t like it when someone strangled and garrotted two people to death and left their bodies for a traumatised charlady to find. He intended to deliver whoever did it to the hangman’s noose as soon as he could.

After saying goodbye to his sergeant, he picked up an evening paper at a corner shop. There was a round-up of Her Majesty’s trip to Paris, with a picture of her on a boat on the River Seine, looking very regal in a shiny silver dress and a big white fur, and a tiara like the one she wore to get married in. She must have been having the time of her life.

Chapter 6

By the following Monday, the royal couple were back at Buckingham Palace and life was humming along at its brisk, London pace. One floor below the Queen’s private apartment in the North Wing, the press secretary put his head around the private secretary’s office door.

‘I’m looking for the Eisenhower file. Need it for a briefing this afternoon. HM’s got the call with the president at four. Have you seen it?’

Sir Hugh Masson looked up from the papers he was reading. ‘No, Jeremy. It’ll be in Miles’s office. Did you hear about the first time the Queen encountered him? Or didn’t, rather.’

‘Eisenhower? No.’

Sir Hugh smiled and sat back in his chair.

‘I heard this first-hand from the King. It was ’forty-two, and General Eisenhower was visiting Windsor Castle. Eisenhower was supposed to have a little tour before the official introductions, but the King and the family were sitting out on the terrace when he saw the general’s party heading their way. The King knew it would cause a terrible fuss if the general was made to encounter them au naturel, like that, without warning, so he got them all – the Queen and the young princesses too – to get down on their knees and hide under the tablecloth until the party was out of sight. They were hooting with laughter. Didn’t say a word afterwards. Very funny.’

Jeremy Radnor-Milne smiled politely. ‘How sweet. But as I say, I need the file itself.’

Sir Hugh shrugged. ‘It’s probably on Fiona’s desk somewhere.’

‘It isn’t, I’ve looked.’

‘Have you checked the cabinets?’