A Death in Diamonds полностью

Feeling better, and calling the dogs to her, she had a brief poke around inside the cabin, and then sat down on the porch. Her protection officers had parked their vehicle at a suitable distance and were only just visible through the trees. The sound of doggy snuffles and the splashes of river water running over rocks and stones provided the perfect backdrop for concentration. She took Joan’s letter out of her pocket and read it, undisturbed.

So, Gina was in fact Ginette, and she was the one who set up the assignation at Cresswell Place. Her fellow escort had always said as much, but the policemen never believed her story. The Queen did, especially given the new detail that Ginette might have chosen the dean’s house because she happened to have the key.

The more she looked over the letter, the more she was convinced that Ginette Fleury was not some poor unfortunate, caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time: she had wanted to be there. She had made it happen. Just as the Queen suspected, she was at the heart of everything.

Ginette knew that Dino Perez (or Nico Rodriguez, as the more recent police reports referred to him) could be violent, and yet she was excited to meet him. She had gone to the house willingly, and gone to great lengths to be the sort of girl he was looking for. The Queen searched for proof in Joan’s account that this person was Princess Grace, but to her nagging concern, the proof wasn’t there. Beryl White and Rita Gollanz only knew for certain that he had specified ‘a princess’. Having been one herself, and with a sister who was the most famous princess in the world at the moment, the Queen found this disturbing. But something else nagged at her, like a cross-current in the stream.

Despite her concerns, the princess theme, the diamonds, the torn white dress from Debenhams, all felt like distractions – a means to an end. Everyone went on and on about what one wore oneself all the time, but to the Queen, it was just about being appropriate for the occasion. Her favourite outfit was the one she was wearing now: tweed breeches tucked into ancient wellies, a comfortable tweed jacket she’d had since she was twenty-one, and a scarf to keep her hair in check. She’d wear it every day if she could. Her diamonds were precious to her because each piece was a treasure trove of family stories, but in themselves, they were only stones, heavy to wear and difficult to keep clean. Daphne had talked about misdirection. What if the girl was important, but the diamonds weren’t the point? What was the other nagging thing?

The Queen sat quietly for several minutes, listening to the running water. A face was hovering in her mind – an old man’s face, and as she thought about it she saw that it was contorted into fury. And something about Argentina. And . . . Paris.

Ah yes! Paris! Ginette was French, so perhaps that explained it.

But the face she saw was that of the Comte de Longchamp, who had been scowling at the German ambassador that fateful evening at the Louvre. It was a glare of pure hatred – understandable, she thought, given what had happened to his Jewish wife and his family. The war might have ended twelve years ago, but by no means everyone had forgiven and forgotten. Some tragedies were too hard to bear.

Ginette had an older sister who worked in the Resistance, who was captured and tortured by the Nazis, and sent off to a concentration camp. Perhaps it was Ravensbrück, near Berlin. The Queen had heard of many Frenchwomen – and brave women from Great Britain too, sent by the Special Operations Executive to help the Resistance – who had suffered and died there.

What was it about Argentina? Something recent, something connected . . . something she had read not long ago. Then she remembered. It was a top secret memorandum from the Foreign Office, informing her that a senior Nazi officer was known to be living in Buenos Aires, and many others – quite possibly hundreds, or even thousands – were thought to have taken refuge in South America.

Could Rodriguez have been one of these men, who escaped across the Atlantic and reinvented himself?

There was something else . . . He liked to gamble in places like Monaco and Tangier, where French was a common language. Was he a Frenchman, perhaps? One who had worked for the Gestapo? That might explain how Ginette knew him.

If he had tortured Marianne Fleury, and if Ginette had somehow recognised him in London, her desire to see him, to be alone with him somewhere quiet, would make perfect sense.

She would have wanted to kill him.

Perhaps she had tried, and failed. Or did she succeed? Was she the one who used the garotte on him? Was she knifing him in the eye when somebody else came in and . . . what? What happened then? How did Ginette end up a victim too? The Queen couldn’t picture it. She was missing something important.