Grace had come at their invitation. The now Acting Master, Matthew Corbin, had phoned him to say they wanted to thank him personally.
‘I’ll explain, Your Majesties!’ Grace said.
‘Please do.’ The King smiled warmly. ‘We are most intrigued!’
‘Well, it was three weeks ago, my colleague, Detective Inspector Branson and I had just left Buckingham Palace and were driving back down to Sussex. I called Sir Tommy — it was just coming up to 3 p.m. I told him that from information I had received, the Holbein the Younger miniature of Anne of Cleves might be missing. Sir Tommy expressed great concern and said he would get back to me. While we were speaking I heard a cuckoo clock in the background calling 3 p.m.’
The Queen raised her eyebrows.
Grace smiled. ‘Indeed, Ma’am. Sir Tommy then rang me back, just five minutes later, and sounded quite distraught. He told me he had gone straight from his office and down to the vault, where the miniature was being stored during the renovations, and that it wasn’t there.’
‘Five minutes?’ The King said, with scepticism in his voice. ‘He rang you back in five minutes?’ His brow furrowed. ‘But that’s impossible. The cuckoo clock sounding 3 p.m. puts him in his home at St James’s Palace. It would take all of five minutes, going at quite a pace, to get from there to the front of Buckingham Palace, let alone down to the vaults. I doubt even Usain Bolt could have done it in that time.’
Grace smiled again. ‘My point exactly. You should have been a detective, Sir.’
The King replied with a laugh. ‘No, that would be my darling wife, she’d make a great one, with all the crime novels she reads!’
The Queen nodded thoughtfully. ‘So, clearly Tommy wasn’t in his office on that first call, he was at home?’
‘Exactly, Your Majesty. It was the cuckoo clock that told me. Sir Tommy didn’t go running over to Buckingham Palace and down to the vaults, because he didn’t need to. He knew the picture wasn’t there — because he had it in his house all along — and latterly in a suitcase. Just to be sure, I did check whether there are any cuckoo clocks in Buckingham Palace. There are three in the Royal Collection, but they are all in other locations.’
The Queen nodded. ‘Yes, they are. One of them is extremely pretty and unusual.’
‘What an absolute scoundrel!’ The King said. ‘To think my mama put so much trust in Tommy, as we have done too.’ He looked at his wife and she nodded agreement. ‘As for those other two — Cadoret and Smoke—’
‘Three, actually, Sir,’ Grace interrupted.
‘Three?’ The Queen quizzed. ‘You’re not going to tell us dear Perry was part of this too, are you?’
‘No, absolutely not,’ Grace replied.
‘Then who? Was it Geoffrey Bailey, the footman?’
‘No, Ma’am, we think Bailey was just trying to blackmail the group into getting Sir Tommy to give him the medal he wanted. It would seem that Sir Peregrine, who was increasingly suspicious of Tommy and his colleagues, may have indiscreetly told Geoffrey Bailey a few things and perhaps they started working together building evidence of the thefts.’
‘Pillow talk?’ The Queen suggested, with a wry smile.
‘Possibly, although we don’t believe the relationship had gone very far.’
‘So, Detective Superintendent,’ The King asked, ‘if not Geoffrey Bailey, who is this fourth person you are referring to?’
‘Fiona Magellan-Lacey, Sir,’ Grace said.
‘As a willing accomplice?’
‘I would say more than that. She has a First in mathematics from Oxford University, and a number of impressive computing sciences qualifications. From the laptops we’ve seized from them both, it would appear she was the mastermind behind all their work on the dark web.’
The King looked puzzled. ‘Tommy always told me she worked in an art gallery — a part-time job that she enjoyed.’
‘Sir Tommy told a lot of people a lot of lies,’ Grace replied.
Both Their Majesties nodded, a little ruefully.
‘But he had all the charm in the world,’ Grace went on. ‘We were completely taken in by him, for a long time.’
‘I think I do owe you an apology,’ King Charles said. ‘I believe I was a bit short with you the first time we met.’
‘Understandably, Sir, you were concerned about Her Majesty.’
‘I was — I clearly underestimated your abilities. Not only were you right in your original assessment of the situation, you’ve done a remarkable job since then — and you have saved countless treasures that are part of our nation’s heritage. I don’t know how you detectives do it, or your thought processes, but my wife and I want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts.’
‘I appreciate that, Sir. I’m just glad my team has got the result it has.’
The King then looked bemused, and slowly shook his head from side to side. He raised his hands in the air and then lowered them again, as if unsure how to express what he wanted to say. ‘It’s — as if — you’ve had to put together the pieces of a gigantic puzzle.’
‘Exactly,’ Grace replied. ‘Almost all major crimes are exactly that: big and often complex puzzles that we have to try to solve.’
The King frowned again and his voice came out a little tighter and more strained than before. ‘What I still just don’t fully understand in all this, is why poor Peregrine was shot. Presumably to silence him, but there would have been a lot of easier ways, surely?’
‘I agree,’ The Queen said. ‘That is what is baffling me, too.’
‘I think I can explain,’ Grace replied. ‘Rose Cadoret has already told us quite a lot — she is, as the expression goes, singing like a canary, in the hope of a reduced sentence. What seems to be the case is that the plan the conspirators made was an extremely dangerous one, based around the classic distraction technique favoured by magicians, but on a far grander scale.’
‘A conjuring trick?’ The King queried.
‘Not a conjuring trick, no, Sir. She told us that she was the one who pushed the length of track onto the line to derail the train. The set-up with the derailing was to make the shooting look like a failed conspiracy to assassinate Her Majesty. By doing it on this scale they felt it would appear the work of either an antimonarchy group or some terrorist organization wanting to make a very big public statement through their actions. What went wrong, for them, was the sniper’s shot.’
‘Very fortunately,’ The King said.
‘Well, the intention was always to kill Sir Peregrine. The plan was for the sniper to take his shot when Sir Peregrine and Her Majesty were just inches apart. But for whatever reason, he didn’t get that chance, and fired anyway. If there had been only a few inches between Her Majesty and Sir Peregrine, then the obvious assumption would have been that the shooter had missed. But to throw our investigation he fired a second shot to give the impression he was still trying to kill Her Majesty. In which case, our investigation would have been very different and we wouldn’t have been looking anything like so hard into Sir Peregrine’s background. All our energies would have been focused in a different direction.’
‘And you are pretty certain, Detective Superintendent,’ The King asked, ‘that the sniper is the fellow found dead at the bottom of the lift shaft?’
‘Yes, PC Jon Smoke and Rose Cadoret were responsible for the murders. We recovered Smoke’s private phone hidden in Ms Cadoret’s flat in Putney. There’s a possible legitimate reason for it being there, because we know they did have an on-off relationship. But GPS triangulation puts Smoke’s phone in Buckingham Palace, and in that part of the Palace where the lift shaft is, at around the estimated time of his death. From there it travelled back to Ms Cadoret’s apartment.’