A Death in Diamonds полностью

Instead, what happened that night was that shortly after eleven, an Aston Martin DB2 sports car drew up outside, driven by a man later identified as a gallerist and member of the Artemis Club called Roly Hill, who had beeped his horn once. The front door was opened by William Pinder’s sister Abigail, who was staying with him at the time, at which point a second man, referred to as ‘Hamlet’, got out of the car’s passenger seat and strode inside as quickly as he could. The sports car then drove off.

‘Hamlet’. The Danish prince. Honestly.

The Queen had a headache. Despite one of her study windows being slightly open to let in the cool September air, she found it difficult to breathe. She didn’t know William Pinder, but she knew his sister Abigail, who was still considered a great catch at the age of twenty-seven. She was a lively, attractive, intelligent young woman – the only deb of her year to go to university – popular at polo matches and famously good at bridge.

‘Hamlet’ was inside the house until well after four in the morning. Like the dean’s, this house had two upstairs bedrooms and a living room downstairs. The living room had a window with thin curtains and one person was seen moving around behind them for a few hours, believed to be William Pinder. There was no sign of the other two.

The Queen’s head throbbed.

‘Hamlet’ left, alone, at 4.15 a.m., when he was picked up by a man later identified as Captain John Macbride of the Grenadier Guards in his E-type Jaguar. Abigail Pinder was seen tearfully waving him goodbye through the window.

What the report did not suggest at any point was that ‘Hamlet’ ever visited the dean’s house, two doors down. Perhaps he or William Pinder could have done so round the back, past the empty house, via the little yards these places had. But the report made no reference to it and the Queen remembered Darbishire’s note that the dog at number 41 hadn’t barked that night, suggesting that nobody had exited the house that way.

That was not what A4 were worried about. It was the simple fact of ‘Hamlet’s presence on this street for several hours, with the attractive blonde who was a close relative of a man they suspected of being a national traitor.

Which, quite honestly, was probably enough.

Even so, not all the Queen’s worst fears were realised – not that she had ever really articulated them to herself. She had never thought for an instant that her husband was directly involved with what happened at number 44, or even knowingly mixed up with anyone who was. And yet . . . the coincidence had preyed on her mind for six months. But perhaps that was all it was: coincidence.

She looked across at Constitution Hill and saw that the Life Guards had ridden out of sight. As her breath returned to normal and her headache abated slightly, she glanced round for the corgis, two of whom had been dozing in their baskets. She called them to her and spent a minute crouched at ground level, ruffling their warm coats.

Coincidence! Coincidences happen all the time. But what a strange accident of timing. ‘Hamlet’ arrived at number 42 less than ten minutes after the watchers had noticed the man who turned out to be ‘Nico Rodriguez’ being let into number 44.

The surveillance officers, as she suspected, had turned out to be the most important witnesses to the goings-on at the dean’s house that night. To Darbishire, these witnesses were the elusive ‘Gregsons’, who remained a question mark in his reports. There were in fact three of them – two young men and a young woman. They had been positioned in number 22, not number 23 as they suggested (they were also the mysterious ‘academics’), and they hadn’t been watching the dean’s house deliberately: they had simply recorded whatever they saw in the street, which at the time didn’t strike them as important or unusual.

What did strike them as very unusual indeed, however, was the arrival of ‘Hamlet’ that night, at the house they were watching, and they spent some time double-checking with each other that it was really him, and telephoning the planner from A1 to ask what to do.

It was easy to imagine that these people had wanted to be helpful a week later, when they realised a double murder had taken place and knew they might have important evidence to share. They had done so, but for the sake of national security they must have decided to get two of them to pretend to be a local couple, to place them in the conveniently unoccupied house next door, and to distract police attention away from what they were really up to. No wonder Inspector Darbishire had been frustrated when he tried to follow up with them.