Her evening gown was hung out, ready for her to change into. In a minute, she would get Bobo to draw her a bath. They had allowed ninety minutes in her schedule to get ready. She would need less than half that time, which left a few precious minutes for relaxation and reflection.
The parade! All those happy, excited people, so keen to see her they had to be held back by the police. The ticker tape rising so high on the wind they could still see it whipping around at the top of the Empire State Building. What a view that had been! She hummed to herself.
Feeling almost guilty with self-indulgent enjoyment of this private moment, she sat at the dressing table, where Bobo had laid out everything she would need. There were the earrings, the necklace, the diamond tiara, her lipstick from Helena Rubinstein, her scent, her powder . . . She pictured all the other ladies in the hotel, and in other hotels and apartments in New York, getting ready for this evening too. They probably took longer over it than she would. She was so used to it by now. With experience, she could adjust her hair and put on her tiara in under two minutes.
Regarding herself in the mirror, she lifted the tiara and positioned it on her head, for effect. All her pieces of jewellery had titles, and this was Queen Alexandra’s Kokoshnik tiara – a great wall of diamonds commissioned by her great-grandmother when she was Princess of Wales. The Queen had already worn it in Canada and knew exactly how she would fit it into her hairstyle later. It took practice. Only one way was truly reliable in the end.
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.
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.’
