A Death in Diamonds

Joan ignored the reference to the club. ‘What sort of civil servant?’

‘Hmm? You ask a lot of questions, don’t you? Just the ordinary kind, you know. Briefcase and bowler hat. Very dull.’

‘Yes, you said it was boring,’ she observed. ‘Where’s your office?’

‘Hmm? What is this, the inquisition? I might ask the same of you.’

‘You know where I work,’ Joan said. ‘Buckingham Palace.’ You really are very evasive, she thought. This interests me.

‘Yes, but what do you do?’ he persisted.

He was only trying to throw the spotlight back on her. She was already beginning to guess what he did. She knew other men who were evasive about their boring jobs and bowler hats.

‘I work for the Queen,’ she said. ‘Temporarily.’

‘Lucky you. How fascinating.’

When he smiled, his grizzled cheeks dimpled in a way that was undeniably attractive. His eyes were grey. Joan had always had rather a thing for men with grey eyes. Dammit again!

For an instant, the thought flashed into her mind that either Sir Hugh had engineered this precise situation . . . But that was so far-fetched. And the chances of such a scheme working out were a thousand to one. She might be on a secret mission for the monarch, but that was no reason to become paranoid.

Those grey eyes were peering closely at her. ‘I was just thinking . . . I’m sure I know you from somewhere.’

She smiled sardonically. ‘Really?’ It was the line so many pilots in the war had used.

He read her mind. ‘No, really! I’ve been trying to place you. The Admiralty. No . . . I know! Dorset, ’forty-four. Longmeadow. Hmm.’

‘I . . . Yes. Hmm.’

He’d been thinking aloud, but they both knew that the first rule of Longmeadow was that you didn’t talk about it. Even now, its existence and the identities of the people who had worked there remained top secret.

Joan wasn’t sure she remembered him, but men had come in and out all the time, and Brigadier Yelland had made her life very stressful. To have visited, Major Ross might well have been in Military Intelligence. And from the careworn look of him, he probably still was.

He smiled with just a corner of his lip.

‘A long time ago. Another life.’

‘Absolutely,’ she said, though she sensed that for him, it wasn’t.

They made small talk for a few minutes. He told her about the cottage in Hampshire where he was trying ‘make something of the garden’. She told him about Bow, and how much she had enjoyed living there, but that it wasn’t practical for work. Then she remembered what time it was and rushed off to the bathroom to denude it of stockings and handkerchiefs, which she had been drying against the bathroom tiles so they would be flat.

She looked at herself in the mirror and realised she was slightly flushed. Too much whisky, late at night. Her hair was a mess again and she put her fingers through it to arrange it, even though it was too late. Then she grinned at herself for being an idiot and went to bed.

Chapter 20

In the offices of Scotland Yard on the Victoria Embankment, Fred Darbishire looked up from his temporary desk. If he stood up a little and leaned to the left, he could see the River Thames through one of the office windows. On the opposite bank, where the Festival of Britain buildings used to be, they were building some sort of skyscraper between Waterloo Station and the Festival Hall.

He didn’t know how tall it would be exactly, but there were dark mutterings among the officers at the Yard who cared about London’s architecture. This was the city of Sir Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor. Its skyline was defined by the dome of St Paul’s and a familiar scattering of church spires. Now, where the bombs had fallen heavily, buildings were starting to go up that were higher than the tallest churches. Big, concrete things that looked as if they belonged in New York. They made him nervous. Woolgar was a fan, needless to say.

It’s progress, sir, isn’t it? Houses? Offices? We need them.

Darbishire needed open sky. He was not quite forty, but he was starting to feel old.

He sat back down and focused on a different kind of progress: his own.

The reason he was here, not at his desk at the Chelsea police station in Lucan Place, was that his reports now went all the way to Her Majesty the Queen, God help him, which meant they got vetted by every goddam senior pen-pusher in between. Every single thing about them had been altered, from the paper he used, to the secretary who typed them up, to the structure of his sentences. The only thing they couldn’t change was what he had to say.

Did Her Majesty care about escort agencies and cleaning contracts? Darbishire doubted it. However, if she wanted to know the intricacies of arranging discreet meeting places in central London, she was welcome to fill her boots.