‘No. I don’t think even he would go that far. As some sort of roving ambassador.’
‘But no one would have him! He abdicated! It’s a terrible idea!’ Joan objected.
The Queen smiled grimly. ‘I’m afraid the Duke of Maidstone is the sort of man to have ghastly ideas and think they’re wonderful. He’s been told all his life how brilliant he is, even if, as I told you, that’s not entirely true.’
‘But what about Tony?’ Joan asked. ‘He’s not an idiot.’
‘No, he isn’t. It surprises me very much. But perhaps if he thought he had even the faintest chance of succeeding . . . He too, is a man who seems very confident in his own abilities. With a little more justification.’
‘And he has a brother in the Private Office,’ Joan agreed. ‘I suppose that might help.’
‘There’s a small group called the Empire Club, or something like that,’ the Queen said. ‘I heard about it on a shooting weekend a couple of years ago. I’m going to find out more about it. I doubt the three of them would be acting alone.’
Joan frowned hard for a while. Then she threw her hands up. ‘What silly, dangerous people, if it’s true, ma’am. They’re opportunistic and incompetent. Hector . . . Major Ross . . . he thinks so too. They don’t stand a cat’s chance in hell of getting what they want. But they could do some real damage in the process.’
The Queen sighed. ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking. They
‘If you’re sure,’ Joan said, ‘shouldn’t you get rid of Jeremy now, before he does something worse than itching powder in your makeup?’
‘That would have been terrible, actually. But no. It’s all conjecture. We don’t have the letter from my uncle that you saw on his desk. As I said at the beginning, we still need proof. If we act without it, we’ll just drive them underground.’
‘Will you tell MI5?’
‘I think, in a way, you already have,’ the Queen said. Joan’s familiarity with “Hector” Ross had its uses. ‘Now I’m waiting for them to come and tell
Oblivious to the fallibilities of witnesses hidden in MI5’s Cresswell Place file, Darbishire checked the final wording of his latest report and put it in the basket for his secretary to type. The good news was that he finally had something useful for Her Majesty to read. The bad news was that Woolgar was more insufferable than ever. ‘I told you, sir! There
The male victim at Cresswell Place turned out to be, not ‘Dino Perez’ or ‘Nico Rodriguez’ from Argentina, but a Frenchman named Jean-Pierre Minot. A small-time thief from a northern suburb of Paris who became a big-time collaborator and torturer for the Gestapo during the Occupation, working at a notorious apartment in the Rue de la Pompe.
Minot had a specialism involving internal doors and ropes that Darbishire wished he hadn’t read about, and now couldn’t get out of his head. He could handle death, he was good at it. But even he had his limits.
Young Minot was very popular with his Nazi comrades, and universally loathed in the rest of Paris. When Darbishire showed ‘Rodriguez’’s picture to his friend in the Sûreté, with the suggestion he might be Gestapo, it took them only a couple of days to come up with a match. It was a shock that he was French, not German. It also meant he was hated even more by his fellow countrymen, for what he did to them.
Minot had done the best he could in South America to disguise his appearance with black hair dye and some form of surgery to his nose. He had aged by over a decade, but the likeness was still strong enough. ‘Something in the eyes’, Beryl White had said. It was no surprise that Ginette Fleury had recognised him.
Ginette herself, however, remained elusive. Woolgar had managed to track the sister down to Ravensbrück camp, just outside Berlin, the largest camp for women in the German Reich. Marianne Fleury was taken there in 1944 on one of the last such trains out of Paris, and had died there eight weeks later, already severely weakened by what she had undergone at Minot’s hands.
In Paris, there was anecdotal evidence that she had been living with a teenage girl before her arrest, but the neighbours thought they came from Normandy and the records there were patchy. After all the bombs and fires, Darbishire wasn’t surprised.
