A Death in Diamonds полностью

She didn’t only mind for herself. She didn’t entirely agree with Philip about the men in moustaches. What was she supposed to do? Trade unionists and socialists were out of the question, but should she try to replace Sir Hugh and his ilk with thrusting young ‘executives’ who had no experience of monarchy or tradition, or any of the myriad unique aspects of her job?

However, at least one of the men in moustaches was not the man she thought he was, and she had to admit that she didn’t feel safe. It wasn’t only Altrincham’s article she worried about, but whether it fitted into the larger pattern of disturbances. Was this what the saboteurs had been building up to? For now, all she could do was put a brave face on it and wait.

Back in London, Darbishire sat late at the desk he had been assigned in Scotland Yard, reading over the typescript of his latest report and knowing that it would go to the palace, for reasons that had still never been fully explained.

Twice, this one had come back to him with question marks about his grammar. His assigned secretary had even been given a better typewriter, but he’d managed to get a smudge of newsprint on the second immaculately rendered page. No doubt it would come back again.

The problem for Darbishire wasn’t his use of subordinate clauses, or grubby thumbprints from ten minutes spent catching up with the Evening Standard, but the fact that his report essentially said nothing. After all his high hopes, it was an elegantly worded temporary admission of defeat. His fears about this job, given that the mighty George Venables didn’t want it, had been fully realised. And the one person in the world who seemed not to be trying to stop him was . . . Lord Stephen Seymour.

Darbishire had received another visit. He was beginning to feel like a puppet with too many strings. The same bland gentleman in a mackintosh had accosted him outside Sloane Square tube station and they had ‘gone for a walk together’ down the road to Orange Square.

‘It’s come to our attention, forgive me for saying so, that you’ve been asking some rather aggressive questions about a member of the Government,’ he’d begun.

Darbishire had pointed out that that was his job. It was then explained to him, in no uncertain terms, that Lord Seymour was not being protected, had not intimidated witnesses, but was already experiencing huge damage to his reputation and deserved not to suffer additional slurs.

The inspector couldn’t believe they would take him for such an idiot. They would say that, wouldn’t they?

The man in the mackintosh had said, ‘You’re probably thinking, we would say that, wouldn’t we? I can see exactly why you would come to that conclusion. All I can say is, it’s an interesting theory, but not the right one. I’m not suggesting Lord Seymour didn’t commit the murders; it’s your job to prove or disprove that point. Only that he didn’t speak to the Gregsons. I mean, it was rather a far-fetched scenario, wasn’t it? Haha. I’d hate you to get lost down that blind alley, Inspector. I’m sure you have better things to do.’

So now, assuming the man in the mackintosh wasn’t lying, which of course he might be, Darbishire felt a fool for listening to Woolgar’s half-baked fantasies. And if Seymour didn’t do it (and if he did, how did he get away with it?), and Billy Hill didn’t do it, who did? And who was protecting whoever it was? Darbishire was still inclined to think it was somebody in the Cabinet – or maybe MI5, for reasons he couldn’t begin to fathom.

Darbishire wasn’t happy, whoever it was. Two people had been horribly murdered, and he was being deliberately hobbled in bringing the murderers to justice. That did public confidence no good, so if it was someone in the Government or MI5, they’d better be thinking about that, too. And if a gang did have a stranglehold on the privates of the high-ups in the Met, then God help them all.

At least he’d had reasonable success tracing Nico Rodriguez’s movements in the months before the murders. As well as his stints in Egypt, Oman and the watering holes of Morocco and Monaco, he had come in and out of London three times in that period, under the guise of delivering trade samples of some kind of industrial plastic. Darbishire suspected that almost certainly, he was smuggling small quantities of drugs or arms, or working out how to do it.

When in London, he stayed at the Marlborough, which wasn’t a bad hotel, even if it wasn’t quite the Dorchester. He won big on the horses and treated himself to cigars and champagne. He had visited the Raffles agency in person, at their little office just off Shepherd Market in Mayfair, to look through their books and find girls to his liking. Was he disappointed when he got Gina Fonteyn instead of Beryl White? If so, he overreacted a bit, didn’t he? And that still didn’t explain what happened to him.