Darbishire didn’t know that there was a comparison to be made between himself and Her Majesty, but he was less tolerant of his subordinate’s speculations than she was. He had learned his lesson. This sounded to him very much like romantic tosh.
‘Can I ask, Woolgar, are you a secret devotee of Mills & Boon? Georgette Heyer?’
‘I quite like Barbara Cartland, sir. My mother has a collection.’
‘It follows.’
‘Is that all, sir?’
‘No. You can get in touch with whoever has the archive for Ravensbrück concentration camp. No, I don’t know how. Just work it out.’
But Woolgar didn’t move.
‘Yes?’
‘Can I just ask, sir, are you going to do anything about what she said about DS Willis? About him scaring women, I mean. And touching them up and . . .’
‘No, Woolgar, I’m not.’
‘Right. Because you don’t believe her, or . . . ?’
‘Because that person, who may be male or female, has chosen to remain anonymous,’ Darbishire pointed out wearily. ‘Because they may well be lying, or have a private grudge. Because to the best of our knowledge, Willis is a highly regarded officer in the Met, with a spotless record, and I don’t want to be the one to tarnish it unless I’m absolutely, rock-solid certain that it’s fully deserved.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘If you tarnish one man, you tarnish us all, Woolgar.’
‘Right, sir.’
Privately, Darbishire thought he might in fact have a little word with DS Willis, let him know there had been talk. That should be enough to clear things up, he judged. Put the wind up the man if any wind, indeed, needed to be put. Darbishire had his doubts about a few senior people, but on the whole the officers of the Metropolitan Police were fine, upstanding men. He was proud to be one of them. It made him sad to think that DS Woolgar – the fan of trashy female fiction – might be so easily persuaded to imagine otherwise.
The Queen closed the file on her desk, got up and walked to the window of her office. A detachment of the Life Guards was riding down Constitution Hill on glossy black horses. She observed the plumes of their helmets swaying in time to the horses’ tails without really taking them in.
Now she knew what she had long suspected, and everything was better, and worse.
According to the report from MI5, a team of officers from their surveillance department, known as A4, had indeed been watching a house in Cresswell Place on the night of the murders – just as Joan assumed. It wasn’t the dean’s house at number 44, but a place two doors down, rented by a certain William Pinder. He was a civil servant who worked for MI5 itself at a fairly senior level.
And possibly the Russians. That’s what they wanted to find out.
The Queen hadn’t known about this particular investigation. Usually they waited until they discovered something of note before telling her. The fact that they hadn’t done so for several months suggested this one wasn’t going well. It must still be active, if Joan was right that they had spotted her in the street ten days ago.
William Pinder was suspected of being the Third Man in the Cambridge spy ring, which had been uncovered so ignominiously after Burgess and Maclean fled to Moscow. Another man from MI6, Kim Philby, had also been accused of spying for the Russians. He had robustly and publicly denied it, but a cloud of suspicion still hung over him in some quarters.
Like her father, the Queen occasionally wondered whether she was harbouring yet another of them. More rumours swirled around her Surveyor of Pictures, Anthony Blunt. In his current role, he was well regarded as an expert on the Baroque. It was less well known that, as a British spy, he had done useful work for the family at the end of the war, when her uncle – now the Duke of Windsor – had created some awkward paperwork that needed to be retrieved in a hurry. Erudite and useful as Blunt was, the Queen still wasn’t sure about him. He had been a Cambridge man, too. If MI5 told her tomorrow that
Perhaps it was this William Pinder. The team from A4 were particularly worried about him that night because he had been acting strangely. A footnote in the report referenced lateness at work, increased alcohol consumption and a ‘furtive attitude’. The Queen thought that being watched by your own employer might do that to a man, if he was good enough at his job to have caught them at it, but they thought he might be preparing to leave the country.
