‘It strikes me, sir,’ DS Woolgar said, ‘that somebody needs to go to Monaco in person. Get people talking. Find out exactly what Rodriguez was doing there. What he was buying or selling. Who he hung around with.’
Since the breakthrough from Buenos Aires, there had been talk of little else in the Chelsea police station beyond the activities of the nefarious Rodriguez around the edge of the Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea.
‘And that would be you, Sergeant, would it?’ Darbishire asked, as straight-faced as he could manage.
‘I don’t see why not, sir,’ Woolgar told him, stoutly.
He was looking tanned and fit – fitter than usual – after a successful few days on the river. Woolgar had been absent with leave quite a bit in May, and the Metropolitan Police Athletic Club rowing eight had just come second in some sort of regatta challenge cup. They had stormed past the Australians and were pipped at the post – or ‘beaten by a canvas’, whatever that was – by the team from Harvard University. The young sergeant was very full of himself. And now he wanted to go to Monte Carlo on the investigation’s budget.
‘Speak French, do you?’ Darbishire asked.
‘I did it for my school certificate. Besides, they all speak English down there, don’t they, sir? The thing is, I know the case inside out. I could ask all the right questions.’
‘Do you picture yourself in a dinner jacket, by any chance?’ Darbishire asked. ‘With a gun in your pocket? And a large pile of chips and a wilting woman at the table? Are you by any chance James Bond?’
‘Who, sir?’
‘The spy. He gambles in French casinos. And why not go to Tangier, while you’re about it? Rodriguez went there, too.’
‘It has to be Monaco, sir. There was a man in the Harvard boat . . .’
‘Oh Christ! Not the Harvard bloody boat again.’
‘. . . And we were drinking together afterwards,’ Woolgar persisted. ‘They got very friendly after the third or fourth pint. He was talking about the Chelsea murders . . .’
Darbishire groaned. ‘They’re not talking about this in New York, are they?’
‘Boston, sir. And yes, they are. It’s in the papers because of the tart in the tiara. Diamonds always make the papers. So do—’
‘I don’t want to hear the theories of a Boston newspaper editor!’
Woolgar looked slightly hurt. ‘He’s not a newspaper editor. He’s the number eight in the crew.’
‘I don’t care if he’s the number fifty!’ Darbishire realised he was sounding touchy about Woolgar’s posh new friends, and about his own recent lack of progress, since the unexpected dead end with Billy Hill. ‘I’m sorry. Go on.’
‘His name’s O’Donnell and his dad owns a boatbuilding company,’ Woolgar explained. ‘They travel a lot. Fancy places. And his dad was saying that last summer he ran into Lord Seymour at a spa in Switzerland. He goes there every year for a health cure, sir. He met his wife there . . .’
‘And?’
‘Lord Seymour was putting it about that he’d recently won a million francs on blackjack in a casino in Monte Carlo. So, O’Donnell – the father, but the son agrees – thinks that maybe he wanted to relive his big night when he got back to London. Seymour asks for a girl who looks like Grace Kelly, Princess Grace, as she now is. He gives her the tiara; there’s no
‘I know that, Woolgar. But you’re forgetting, Seymour didn’t have time for any of this. He didn’t leave the Houses of Parliament until after Rodriguez arrived in Cresswell Place.’
‘Ah. That’s what you’re supposed to think, sir. But we only have one witness’s word for it. Bear with me.’
Darbishire raised a sceptical eyebrow.
‘Anyway,’ Woolgar continued, ‘Seymour meets with Gina Fonteyn, and somehow Rodriguez gets in and it all goes pear-shaped. He was fuzzy on the details, but O’Donnell – the son, not the father – pointed out that Rodriguez gambled in Monte Carlo, too. That’s all over the papers now. He might have lost money to Seymour there, or won it off him, or maybe Seymour needed a favour, something dark and dirty, and they fell out, and that’s why Rodriguez followed them in Chelsea. And Seymour turned on him. He was a commando in the war, sir, so—’
‘Mmm, I see,’ Darbishire cut in. ‘And was he also a magician? Did he become invisible? Did he hypnotise the witnesses?’
‘Not exactly, sir,’ Woolgar said cheerfully, finding sarcasm no obstacle to his flow.
‘Oh?’
‘He shut them up, sir, didn’t he? That’s why you’re not allowed to try and talk to them again.’ He folded his arms and smiled. Point proven, he seemed to say. ‘But if I could go to Monaco and do some digging . . .’
‘Hang on, Sergeant.’ Darbishire raised a hand. ‘I’m not allowed to
