‘I understand, ma’am.’
‘Now, I’m afraid I must go. I’m already late.’
Throughout the discussion, Joan had the impression that something else was preying on the Queen’s mind – more worrying, even than the fact that one of her closest advisers might be undermining her and was, in fact, a traitor. What could be worse than that? Joan also sensed that there was no one the Queen could talk to about it – no one at all. Which begged a few questions.
She had a lot to think about.
Chapter 10
The Victorian villas of the Boltons were a cut above most Chelsea houses. They sat in opposing crescent shapes either side of an oasis of green, where St Mary The Boltons church catered to a select little congregation. Deborah Fairdale’s home, which she shared with her husband and daughter, was the largest and loveliest of them all, as befitted a Hollywood star who had become as much loved on the West End stage as she was in America.
Born to a music teacher and his wife in South Carolina, Deborah never expected to be sharing jokes with the king of England and Sir Laurence Olivier, but after starring alongside Cary Grant, she had come to England to perform in a Noël Coward play, fallen for a Brit and stayed. In her West End dressing room back in 1937, Paul Locke had led her to believe he was a car mechanic, which was sort of true, but really, he was a racing driver. Now, at the grand old age of fifty-two, and minus a leg after the Battle of Monte Cassino, he ran his own racing team. He didn’t mind being ‘Mr Fairdale’ half the time, when really she should be ‘Mrs Locke’. It was one of the many things Deborah loved about him.
Together, they were the couple that every London socialite wanted to know. Miss Fairdale was a proud Southern girl and tried to maintain her home state’s reputation for hospitality. When it came to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, she always liked to have someone special for them each to meet. They couldn’t always socialise with who they chose, and the duke in particular had an endless appetite for interesting people in the arts and sciences, so Deborah liked to mix it up a bit.
She had been excited all week, thinking of this particular soirée, but it wasn’t going the way she’d planned at all. Paul had found her a rocket designer whom Prince Philip would adore, but her special guest for the Queen was horribly late, and in the meantime all anybody wanted to talk about was murder. Deborah had tried several times to shift the conversation on to more enlightening topics, but by the second martini she realised Her Majesty was as interested as anyone else.
For her part, the Queen was having a fascinating time. She had grown up with some of the best gossips in the country – her mother’s household – so she was used to the interest that many people took in other people’s business. Tonight, she had her own reasons for being among them, so she didn’t judge. In fact, she was grateful.
‘So, tell me,’ the wife of a press baron asked, ‘can you really see the place where it happened from your house?’
‘Not quite,’ Deborah admitted. Standing beside the grand piano in her double-aspect living room, she gestured beyond the balcony windows. ‘The mews house backs on to a garden about five houses down. If you lean out of our top floor bathroom you could probably see the roof.’
‘Oh my God! How thrilling! Did you hear anything?’
‘Not a peep,’ Paul said smoothly, circulating with the cocktail shaker. ‘Although to talk to my wife, you’d think it happened in our basement.’
Deborah struck a theatrically affronted pose.
‘Paul! Don’t be rude. We did have the police round, to ask if we’d seen any sign of fugitives, but of course we hadn’t. I’m ashamed to say I was disappointed.’
‘How do you know there wasn’t anyone hiding in the garden?’ an old Hollywood pal of Deborah’s asked.
She cocked an eyebrow. ‘Are you suggesting my garden is an overgrown jungle, by any chance, Carole? True, it’s so full of trees and bushes we wouldn’t have seen a thing, but the chickens would have clucked the place down. They get furious if their sleep’s disturbed. And Gregory would have gone absolutely berserk.’
Gregory Peck was the name of Deborah’s cockerel, who was infamous in the Boltons for his dawn alarm. He was only kept alive by the fact that the neighbours were grateful for her little flock’s fresh eggs. Gregory was touchy and territorial, and he’d have crowed the place down if anyone had leaped over their garden wall. But that night he’d been perfectly quiet until dawn.
‘Did anyone else see anything?’ the rocket designer wondered.
‘The police have been tramping round all the gardens, looking for clues,’ Deborah said. ‘As you can imagine, Gregory didn’t approve. If someone had got in, they could’ve run down the little side passage, I suppose. I asked Mike, our chauffeur, whose house is on the street . . .’
‘Your chauffer lives there?’ the press baron’s wife asked. ‘Practically next door?’
‘Five doors down.’ Deborah and Paul were among the few residents of the Boltons who could still afford to keep the original mews house on.
‘He must know something?’ Carole said, with her lovely Californian twang. ‘Did he see the people going in? Or coming out? Were they in cahoots? Don’t you love that word? Cahoots. It’s the only thing that makes sense.’
‘Mike didn’t see a thing. Not that night. But . . .’ Deborah lowered her voice and they all leaned in. ‘He’s heard stories about other couples. Going into that very house. On other nights.’
‘The dean’s house?’
‘Uh-huh. They were always very proper,’ she added, using the British term. ‘Well dressed in their dickie bows and furs. They’d be dropped off by cab and disappear straight inside.’
‘No!’
‘Oh yes. He has it on good authority. The thing about Mike is, he’ll talk to anyone. He’s a fount of knowledge. Never talk in the car, that’s what I’ve learned. Chauffeurs say nothing, but they hear everything.’
‘So the dean’s house was a . . . knocking shop?’ Carole’s companion, a big game hunter, asked, with a sidelong glance at the Queen. She felt dreadful for poor Clement Moreton, but didn’t want to interrupt the conversation.
‘I dread to think what it was,’ Deborah said. ‘Perhaps he was running a very upmarket bedsit. Who knows?’
‘Did your man hear anything that night?’
‘Well . . . he thinks he heard a gunshot,’ Deborah admitted, with a look of innocent mischief that had been one of her calling cards in Hollywood.
There was a communal intake of breath and then the questions came thick and fast.
‘A what?’
‘Gunshot?’
‘Are you serious?’
‘That never got mentioned,’ the press baron’s wife remarked, looking peeved that her husband’s many papers had missed it.
‘Well, I know,’ Deborah agreed. ‘So maybe it was a car backfiring, but Mike swears he heard something. At around two or three in the morning, All I know is, it didn’t set Gregory off, so it wasn’t in our backyard.’
The conversation moved on to other topics and the big game hunter decided to tell the Queen in great detail about the drama of his recent visit to Tanganyika. She waited for half an hour, wondering if the subject of what had happened in the mews would come around again. Keen for more information, she eventually did the only thing she could think of, and spilled the remains of her martini on her dress.
‘Oh, how clumsy. Deborah, you wouldn’t mind helping me sponge this off, would you?’