He gave her an uncertain smile, picked up his fork and speared the rice, turning some of it over and releasing steam. ‘I’m sorry — I had a rather mixed day.’
‘At Buckingham Palace?’
‘Some of the time, yes. I had another meeting with The King.’
She smiled again. This time it was the kind of warm, interested, gorgeous smile he’d fallen in love with soon after he’d first met this amazing, beautiful woman.
Then she quizzed, ‘How many couples in the world, at this moment, are having their evening meal and one of them tells the other, so casually, Oh, I had another meeting with The King today?’
He gave a bemused look. ‘It is extraordinary, surreal. It’s an immense privilege, I know but — hell...’ He shook his head. ‘The responsibility of this whole thing.’
She looked at him sympathetically. ‘I know.’
‘It might be easier if I felt the top brass had my back. But I had a meeting with Downing this afternoon and he went and read out a litany of past assassination attempts on British monarchs — giving me the clear impression he feels I may not be right in my hypothesis that The Queen was not the intended target.’
‘But you are certain she wasn’t, right?’
He shrugged. ‘I’m as certain as it’s possible to be.’
‘And Glenn? He has good instincts.’
He nodded. ‘Glenn’s with me. But until we arrest the shooter we can’t be one hundred per cent sure.’
‘Are you getting closer to that?’
‘I think we could be if...’ He shook his head. ‘If I hadn’t run into a detective who thinks one day soon he will be my boss.’
‘Oh God, not another Cassian Pewe type?’
‘Not exactly, but he does rather fancy himself and thinks he’s a comedian.’ He shrugged. ‘The one positive is the progress Scroope’s made with the coded entries in the diary. There’s only a few bits of it that are currently baffling him. He thinks they may be names — but they could be items, locations — we really don’t know at this stage. There are five altogether. They’re different to the rest of the code — in that they appear to be cryptic clues.’
She smiled. ‘My grandad on my mum’s side would have had fun with those — he used to give us all cryptic puzzles inside our Christmas crackers every year.’
‘Is that where you got your love of crosswords, Sudoku and puzzles from?’
‘Yes, I’m sure it was him who started me off. Can I have a look at them or are they classified?’
‘I’ll have to get you to sign under the Official Secrets Act if you succeed in deciphering them!’
‘Deal!’
He unlocked his phone, then turned it round to face her.
‘R I S K K?’ Cleo read the letters aloud from the screen.
‘Scroll down,’ he urged.
She ate another mouthful, then read out: ‘E J N W.’
She looked up at him and he just nodded, then she scrolled down again. ‘R S Z K Y Z N K Z K S. These are what the tortoise man can’t decipher?’
‘He’ll get there. He’s working on the key but time is critical.’
She read out the next: ‘N X W K X Z X W K X.’ Then the final one, ‘J F K Y.’
She studied them for a moment, frowning. Then she jumped up and went over to the Welsh dresser, returning with a lined notepad and a pen. She wrote in large letters, R I S K K, then chewed another mouthful of her food, deep in thought.
Grace watched her as she started jotting down numbers, then tapped the pen against her teeth before jotting down some more. An instant later she seemed distracted and was looking past him, over his shoulder. Then he heard Noah’s voice. He turned to see his son, in his Ghostbusters pyjamas, walking barefoot into the room. ‘Mummy, Daddy, I can’t sleep.’
Cleo and Roy both jumped up. As they did so, his job phone rang.
‘Roy Grace,’ he answered.
Cleo signalled that she would take care of Noah.
Grace heard a voice at the other end that he recognized and did not fill him with any kind of joy. At all.
71
Monday 27 November 2023
‘Roy, it’s Greg Mosse — I hope I’m not disturbing you from anything important?’
‘I’m actually in the middle of eating.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry — I can call back — when would be convenient?’ His attempt at trying to sound apologetic reminded Grace of an expression he’d once heard. If you can fake sincerity, the rest is easy.
‘It’s OK, if this is quick. My wife’s just had to go up and deal with one of our kids.’
‘Look, two things. First is, I think you and I got off to a bad start and I just want to hold out an olive branch and say I’m sorry that happened — we need to work together — and it is indeed possible that our two investigations are linked. There’s too much at stake for us not to cooperate.’
‘I’d agree with that,’ Grace replied.
‘Good. Excellent. We need to share information — on what you have to date on the shooting of Sir Peregrine, and what I have to date on the death of Geoffrey Bailey. I do of course get daily updates from my Met officer on your team, but I think it would be far better if we could bury the hatchet and work together.’
Warily, Grace said, ‘I would be very happy to do that.’
‘That’s great. Great. The second thing is there’s something very strange that’s been discovered during the postmortem on Geoffrey Bailey.’
‘Which is?’
‘I don’t want to keep you from your dinner but I’ve been allocated a room to use for interviews at Buckingham Palace. Would you be free to meet me there some time tomorrow — the sooner the better?’
‘I’ve got a briefing meeting at 8 a.m. I could be there by 11 a.m.’
‘Excellent. I’ll inform the guards at the front entrance. We’ll have a good talk and make a plan of action. We all need to sharpen our pencils, right?’
‘My team use ball-point pens,’ Grace replied. ‘They don’t need sharpening.’
72
Monday 27 November 2023
Her boss had been in a strange mood all day. Normally, the Director of the Royal Collection would leave the office in St James’s Palace sharply at 5 p.m. every day, in order to get home in time to bathe her young children, put them to bed and read them a story.
Which was Rose Cadoret’s idea of hell. Dogs, yes, cats, yes, children, no thanks. She was with Woody Allen, who called having children, Aimless reproduction.
But the reason they were both still at work at 8 p.m. on this wet Monday night, was because Lorraine McKnight was suddenly, today, on a mission to get to grips with the Royal Collection inventory. She’d had a flea in her ear from Tommy, she told Rose. The King’s favourite painting in the Breakfast Room at Clarence House had gone missing, and now no one knew where the hell The Queen’s beloved Vermeer had been moved to from the Picture Gallery.
Well, no one except herself, Rose thought, who was feeling increasingly pissed off with her boss. And very concerned. She was tired, hungry and facing the prospect of a thirty-minute bike ride through the darkness and rain to her flat in Putney.
She could take the bus tonight, except she couldn’t. Nor a taxi. She had a full rucksack, and none of the Palace guards had ever raised an eyebrow as she gaily pedalled past them, every evening, smuggling out art treasures. But that wasn’t the main reason that she had to cycle tonight.
Lorraine pointed at the computer screen. At the rows of columns of RCINs — Royal Collection Inventory Numbers — by which every item of the one million and fifty-seven thousand items in the Royal Collection was identified. ‘I don’t know what’s going on, Rose,’ she said, sounding exasperated. ‘There are around two hundred items I can’t account for at the moment. Tommy might blame me for that damned Vermeer going missing, but all of this is his fault. Those bloody builders all over the place have no respect for art of any kind. Instead of informing me of every object they have to move, so we can agree a temporary new location and log it there, I think the lazy buggers just shove stuff anywhere they think is out of harm’s way.’