A Death in Diamonds

She trembled and looked desperately towards Woolgar. What was it about him? Darbishire briefly wondered if he had another sandwich stuffed in his pocket and she thought it was a gun. Should he throw the man out? He would, if she did it again. Darbishire turned and glared at him, then straightened and lowered his voice to reassure her a little. Perhaps he’d overdone the threat.

‘We can protect you, Beryl, but you have to help us. Can you? For Gina’s sake? Because I don’t think you meant any of this to happen.’

Beryl stared him full in the face, wide-eyed and noticeably pale.

‘Meant it to happen? Meant it? What are you getting at? Of course I didn’t mean it. I just . . . Gina wanted to go with him. I didn’t know where they went, I swear. D’you think I’m in danger? I just went away because I was feeling rotten, like I told you. My head.’ She pressed the heels of her hands to her temples, as if to demonstrate. ‘What dangerous characters? I don’t even know any. I mean, I know some, but none as would do this. Would they? I don’t understand. I—’

‘There, there. Calm down. As I say, we can protect you.’

She glared at him again. ‘You can’t,’ she spat, to his astonishment.

‘What do you mean by that?’

Her whole demeanour changed. She had been openly panicking, but now she sat back in her chair and her lip curled. ‘Since when did the likes of you ever protect the likes of me?’

For the first time, Darbishire sensed he was seeing the true Beryl White. And she had a very low opinion of him, of the Metropolitan Police, and of everything that had happened here so far, despite his best assurances.

For the next half-hour, he grilled her as hard as he could about who might have set up the meeting with Perez, what she knew and what they did to buy her silence. But the silly girl was scared witless, and for a full thirty minutes he got nothing further out of her at all.

Chapter 8

The Honourable Fiona Matherton-Smith had a beloved spaniel called Monty, and Joan knew this because Monty’s empty dog basket still took pride of place beside the radiator in the deputy private secretary’s office, which she now also shared. In the week since she had been offered the job of assistant private secretary by Sir Hugh (with obvious shock and reluctance on his part, and absolute astonishment on hers), Joan twice tried to move the dog basket, to make way for much-needed filing cabinets, but Miles Urquhart wouldn’t hear of it.

‘The place isn’t the same without Monty,’ he opined. Joan tried not to take it personally, but a treasured spaniel was one of the many things Fiona possessed and she did not. Others, in no particular order, included a title, a famous family chef, an outsize bottle of L’Air du Temps (a gift from an admirer, found in a desk drawer next to the paper clips) and a personal acquaintance with at least half the men who had been at Eton in the last twenty years.

It wasn’t easy to make up for these deficiencies. However, for what it was worth, Joan had an innate ability not only to find important documents in Fiona’s idiosyncratic horizontal filing system, but to put them back in places where other people – notably the private, deputy and press secretaries – could find them too. There was also her memory for names: both of the senior men around the globe who needed to speak to the Private Office, and for their secretaries and assistants, who purred like kittens to be remembered and suddenly made all transactions easier.

On her first day, Joan installed an impressive typewriter on her desk, and though the DPS insisted the noise of the keys would drive him mad, her ability to anticipate and type up the notes and memoranda he needed saved him precious minutes in a busy day. She couldn’t bring in Parisian-style pastries, but she wasn’t a fool and she arrived instead with bags of fresh bagels and cinnamon babkas from the East End, which were always gone by ten o’clock.

Every half-hour, Urquhart would give her a new task, or a head would pop round the door and the private or press secretary would add something for her to do. It was mostly menial work and the thanks were always perfunctory, but Joan didn’t care.

She was at the centre of the world and loving every minute.

Within twenty-four hours of her arrival, someone from the White House had called to sort out the Queen’s sleeping arrangements for her stay in Washington in October. Urquhart, who found such details beneath his dignity, had left her to it.

Joan had since met the prime minister, the lord chancellor, the Archbishop of York and the chairman of the BBC. She saw Her Majesty almost daily, to deliver or pick up the red boxes of official paperwork for the Queen to review. And because Joan mastered the files so quickly, she became the expert on the schedules for the upcoming royal visits. Other members of staff were coming to rely on her. They would always address their questions to the DPS, but they increasingly turned to Joan for the answers.