He took a deep breath. Was this really happening?

  But at the same time a cog had started turning inside his head. Just slowly. That old familiar sense of unease. Something he could not immediately lay a finger on. But it was there. Unsettling him.

  34

  Wednesday 22 November 2023

  The room, as Grace closed the door behind him, almost took his breath away. It was on a different level of splendour to everything he had seen so far in this Aladdin’s Cave of a palace. Gold walls, lined with mostly oval-framed period portraits, beneath an intricately stuccoed gold ceiling. There was a large bay window, giving a view out across the lawns to the lake beyond. A group of chairs arranged around a gold-inlaid coffee table formed a seating area. Candelabras, fine porcelain ornaments and busts on columns were everywhere he glanced.

  King Charles rose from behind a very small but beautiful leather-topped desk, on which lay a memo pad and two red felt-tipped pens. He could not have been dressed or presented more immaculately, Grace thought. His silver hair gave him a distinguished air, and his dark navy suit fitted him as if it had been sculpted rather than sewn. Against his white shirt, his black tie was perfectly knotted. Far better than Grace could ever manage himself.

  The King was a tiny bit shorter in real life than he had imagined, but Grace was reminded of a quote about the late legend Greta Garbo, which he had heard but never really understood before: Greta Garbo’s understudy does everything that Greta Garbo does, except what it is that Greta Garbo does.

  He understood it now.

  This was no understudy holding out his hand. Over seventy years of joy, stress and the burden of duty etched into his features in equal measures.

  ‘Detective Superintendent Roy Grace?’

  ‘Your Majesty.’ Grace shook his hand then gave a head-bow. ‘If I may say, Sir, this is one of the most beautiful rooms I’ve ever seen.’

  The King looked pleased. ‘Thank you.’ He stood ramrod straight and put a hand into one of his jacket’s side pockets, gesticulating with the other hand. ‘This was my dear Mama’s sitting room. It’s barely been touched since her death,’ he said. Then his demeanour became much more serious. ‘But you’re not here for a guided tour, Detective Superintendent, are you?’

  Grace smiled. ‘No, Sir.’

  The King gestured at the cluster of chairs for him to sit, then sat back down himself. ‘Thank you for coming, I appreciate how busy you must be at the moment. I wanted a private word, because I need to understand exactly what you know at this stage. Where are you at with your investigation? Do you have a suspect – even if you can’t tell the press about it? I appreciate you have an excellent reputation, Detective Superintendent, but this is my darling wife they’ve tried to kill, and there are ramifications of national significance. What have you learned so far from the postmortem, from the derailment, from the bullets used and from your general Intelligence sources?’

  ‘Your Majesty, it’s what we call early doors so far in the investigation. I can assure you that we have more resources on this case than ever before in the history of the Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team.’

  The King gave him an odd, almost desperate stare. ‘And is that enough? If someone had tried to kill your wife, the woman you love, wouldn’t you be throwing every resource in the nation at it?’

  Grace hesitated before replying. Three years ago, someone had tried and very nearly succeeded in killing Cleo, but he wasn’t going to go there now. The King looked deeply worried – and no wonder.

  Taking a deep breath Grace replied, ‘Your Majesty, let me give you some important reassurance. I do not believe Her Majesty was the target of the shooter. I have discussed this with both the Met Police and the Royal Protection team, both of which have officers on my team.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Detective Superintendent, I don’t quite understand,’ The King said sharply.

  ‘Sir, Your Majesty, please allow me to explain my thought process.’

  The King, glaring at him now as if Grace were an imbecile, gestured impatiently for him to continue. Grace told him his findings to date.

  When he had finished, The King was a little calmer but seemed only partially reassured. ‘But why – why on earth would anyone want to kill poor Peregrine? He was an extremely decent and loyal man – I’d never heard a bad word about him from any of my staff. Ever.’

  ‘Might he have had any enemies, Your Majesty? It’s a question we are asking all who knew him. Perhaps someone he was holding back from promotion by staying too long in office?’

  ‘Enemies? Good Lord, I can’t think of anyone less likely to have had enemies. Peregrine’s deputy is a thoroughly decent chap, and well aware he has several years to wait for that promotion – if indeed he made it through the selection process. I’ve a horrible feeling, Detective Superintendent, that if you are looking for the murderer inside the walls of the Royal Household, you are very much looking in the wrong place – however credible what you’ve told me might be. And all the time you are looking in the wrong place, the killer is out there, preparing to strike again. I need reassurance that my wife is safe. Can you give me that?’

  Grace stared The King back in the eye. ‘Queen Camilla is safe, Your Majesty,’ he said. ‘I can assure you.’

  The King looked doubtful, still. ‘If you say so, but God help us if you are wrong.’

  35

  Wednesday 22 November 2023

  ‘God help us if you are wrong.’

  The King’s voice was loud and clear through Jon Smoke’s headphones. Just as The Queen’s voice had been a short while earlier. And the voices of the detectives.

  He would collect the tiny radio mics later after the bosses had departed the Palace for the day. The mic in the royal sitting room was concealed behind one of the 160 volumes of Prince Albert’s books on French history – in French – on the bookcase shelves. The one in the former Queen’s sitting room, now The King’s office, was inside the grate of the fireplace, which was never lit.

  What he had heard made him angry. So angry.

  That clever dick detective. Convincing first Camilla and then Charles that Her Maj had not been the target. How the hell had that happened? Well, he knew, he’d listened to the explanations – hypotheses – the detectives had given. He’d not considered this, not seriously. He – they – all had made the assumption that with the Royal Train derailed, and a Private Secretary shot dead as they emerged from the tunnel, the shooter had missed his target, panicked and fled. Surely that was blindingly obvious. Blindingly obvious The Queen had been the target. Blindingly obvious to everyone.

  Everyone except one stubborn detective.

  And Camilla seemed to have swallowed it. Charles, too – perhaps a little less so, but he’d accepted the detective’s very persuasive argument.

  And what he had just heard underpinned the detective’s comments in his press conference yesterday. About not jumping to conclusions, or whatever the phrase he used.

  The police investigation was no longer going to be the hunt for a gunman and his Not-My-King cohorts, which they’d prepared for and laid the trail for.

  Instead it would be a far deeper and more dangerous dig into Why Sir Peregrine Greaves?

  And just how far would they have to delve?

  It was a dangerously shallow grave. There was a lot that needed to be taken care of, and very fast.

  ‘Sod it!’ he said aloud. It came out as a rasp of anger, he thought to himself, appropriate, since he actually was a RaSP officer. A trusted member of the team who guarded the cluster of Royal Palaces, including Buckingham Palace itself as well as Clarence House and St James’s Palace, where the bosses and all the senior royals, including the Prince and Princess of Wales and the Princess Royal, had London residential bases.

  Not that Jon Smoke had anything against the members of the Royal Family he was paid to protect. Good luck to them, he thought. Make the most of whatever privilege you’d been born into, because he was born into a shit life that just kept on getting more shit.

  His dad was a drunk and a wifebeater who, when Jon was seven, hit his mother too hard one night, and she died. His dad was put away for a long sentence and Jon was taken into care, never seeing his father again – he died in a prison brawl. He moved away from his Newcastle birthplace and, for the next nine years, went from crap foster home to even crapper foster home. When he was sixteen, he walked out of the last one, in south London, and past a shabby-looking theatre, with a sign in the window advertising for stagehands. He didn’t know what a stagehand was but went in, and got taken on.

  A stagehand in this theatre was basically a skivvy and he was fine with that, and with the wage he got. He was less fine with the lecherous old wardrobe master trying to snog him in the pub around the corner, after the last night of a particularly weird and not well-attended play.

  A year on, attracted by a TV commercial recruiting for the Army, he applied, and was accepted. After enlisting, for the first time in his life, he discovered he was actually good at something.

  Shooting.

  He had a real talent – or aptitude, as they called it – for target shooting.

  Within two years he was on the Army shooting squad, competing – and winning silver – at the National Shooting Centre at Bisley.

  Two weeks after, just turning nineteen, he was invited to an interview where he was told he had been selected to train for the elite sniper course, provided he passed the psychological evaluation. He passed and was elated that he had an ability – talent, whatever it was called – that meant he was actually valued. He spent five months at the Infantry Battle School in Brecon, in Wales, undergoing rigorous training under the British Army’s Sniper Wing. He learned precision shooting accuracy at long range, camouflage and fieldcraft.

  The most important thing he took away was how to remain stationary in a concealed position for, if necessary, days on end. This was to stand him in good stead after he joined the Paras – and save his life. And bring him to where he was now, facing a very golden future.

  36

  Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 2007

  Three miles north-east from Camp Bastion, with its 20-mile-long perimeter wall and 2.2-mile runway. It was late afternoon going into early evening, and the searing sun was starting to power down. Jon Smoke had read that Australia has more creatures that can kill you than any other country. That might well be the case, he thought, but nowhere on earth had more creatures that could bite you than right here.

  He’d spent two solitary days perched twenty feet up this dense tree, uncomfortably hot in his ghillie suit, but glad of the camouflage the gear afforded him – as well as grateful for the shade of the leaves. He might be concealed from the Taliban but not from the damned critter population of Afghanistan. No one ever told you that you had to fight two different enemies and that the Taliban was the lesser of the two. His camouflage concealed him from them. But not from the plague of vicious and eerily translucent camel spiders the size of saucers, which could and did regularly jump four feet straight at him, scaring the hell out of him. Until Scottie told him to relax, they weren’t attacking him, they just liked the shade that humans provided and wanted to be in it before anything else got there.

  There were equally large and gross centipedes with a vicious and painful bite, as well as scorpions, sandflies, mosquitoes and ticks, all of which alternated between viewing him as Public Enemy Number One – and plat du jour.

  ‘The theatre of war’, he reflected. It was a weird description. Or perhaps not. There was no proscenium arch to define the stage. It was simply everything he could see that stretched out ahead into the far distance. The set was an arid desert landscape, with steep escarpments, patches of scrub and occasional clusters of trees like the ones he and Scottie were concealed in now. If you removed some props and just added a few cacti, Clint Eastwood might have ridden by on horseback with a cigar in his mouth, to the soundtrack of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

  The set was decorated – dressed, they called it in the theatre world – with props: a burnt-out tank, a half-track detonated by a landmine, lying on its side. Skeletal vehicles from both sides haphazardly scattered by the roadside and away into the distance. Along with clouds of flies and other scavengers of the desert feasting on the corpses and scattered limbs and entrails of fallen fighters. Not fake props these, any more than the rotting cadavers inside the vehicles were, either. Certainly, not the kind you’d rent from a theatrical costumier, to take to a fancy-dress party.

  Every few minutes, when what passed for a breeze wafted in their direction, he could smell it. The stench of death. It was like no other smell on earth. Heavy, rancid, cloying. Cigarette smoke masked it. He craved one now, but his supply of fags was running low. He’d had to ration himself to one every six hours. Three hours and ten minutes to go.

  Breathing just through your mouth worked, also.

  The light was definitely starting to fail now. Maybe the offensive would begin tonight. He had his night vision scope ready.

  ‘Curtain up in ten minutes,’ he whispered to himself and smiled. His mind went to strange places when he spent hours in solitude. He let it create scenarios. It especially helped get him through the long hours of darkness – which would be here imminently.

  Occasionally he exchanged words – friendly insults mostly – with his fellow sniper and buddy Stuart Macdonald, Scottie, who was ensconced in another tree a short distance away. The banter helped keep up their spirits.

  ‘How you doing, wanker?’ Macdonald shouted in his thick accent.

  ‘Better than you, tosser! I’m in the jacuzzi with three naked ladies and a bottle of Champers!’ he retaliated.

  Macdonald was a gung-ho, instantly likeable, Scotsman from Aberdeen. They’d passed out of the sniper course together, and two weeks later, seconded to the elite Parachute Regiment, found themselves both on the same military transport plane bound for Kabul, Afghanistan. And still together, helicoptered into the hotspot, Helmand Province.

  Scottie ribbed Smoke incessantly about what wankers all Sassenachs were. Jon didn’t mind, he didn’t feel any loyalty to England. Being English – British – meant nothing to him. Scottie also told irreverent jokes, many of which crossed the line, which Jon Smoke liked, and they helped take his mind off what might lie ahead.

  Not that he was afraid of dying, he was a fatalist. And, in truth, right now at twenty years old, with no family and no girlfriend, he didn’t actually have anything in particular to live for. Unlike his new buddy, who was crazily in lust and love.

  Soon after they’d first met, Scottie had showed him photographs over a pint or two in a local pub of a beautiful nineteen-year-old woman, Effie, who was his fiancée. Smoke hadn’t been able to resist telling this short, stocky, pugnacious-faced man that he appeared to be punching above his weight.

  ‘Always, my friend! Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’ Scottie had retorted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Robert Browning.’

  ‘Who’s he? A politician?’

  Scottie had shaken his head. ‘I always knew you Sassenachs were wankers – didn’t realize you were illiterate, too. He was a poet – only one of your most famous poets ever.’

  He went on to tell Smoke that Effie was a beautician and that when he came home from this tour, with the money he had saved he was going to invest with her to set up her own salon, quit the Army and become her business partner. Oh, and that she was four months pregnant.

  Smoke envied him his plan as much as he envied him his fiancée. He didn’t have any plan beyond what he was here to do right now.

  They’d both been here for more than forty-eight hours now, in position to give cover to their platoon when it made its next advance towards a Taliban encampment 10 miles ahead. And also in a position to watch, and if necessary neutralize, any Taliban attempting to further mine the road ahead with Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) – homemade bombs.

  The advance should have happened last night, but it hadn’t, and there’d been no word all day on his radio from his commanding officer, Brigadier Jason Finch. Now dusk was falling again. Falling fast. His supply of water was getting low and the artificial bladder he urinated into, painfully, via a catheter he’d inserted himself, was getting increasingly swollen. He needed a shit badly, but that was going to have to wait until—

  He stiffened.

  Voices. Faint.

  But not coming from the right direction.

  Peering through the dense leaves and the falling twilight, through his spotting scope, he saw – Jesus – a ragbag group of ten, maybe a dozen, heavily armed Taliban soldiers, some turbaned, marching straight towards them. Maybe a mile off. They would be here in about twenty minutes.

  Keeping his voice low, Scottie told him he’d seen them too.

  This wasn’t supposed to be happening.

  Smoke did a quick calculation. He had three weapons. His L115A3 sniper rifle, fitted with a night-sight, his L85A2 semiautomatic rifle and his Glock 17 pistol. He had fifty rounds of .338 Lapua Magnum ammunition for his sniper rifle. But the bolt action was slow – he’d only pick a handful of them off before they began to return fire. And, as the AK47s the Taliban were armed with were capable of firing 650 rounds a minute, he and Scottie would be cut to ribbons in seconds.

  He had a better chance with the semi-automatic, L85A2 rifle, strapped to his back. He had five magazines, each holding thirty rounds of 5.56 NATO ammo. That gave him a total of 150 rounds. The gun was capable of firing at a similar rate to the AK47 in automatic mode. But he and Scottie would need to make every bullet count. If not, they would both be in very big trouble.

  He turned down the volume on his radio to its lowest setting, then radioed his lieutenant, and when he heard his calm, reassuring voice he said, ‘Sir, a group of estimated ten, maybe twelve Terry Taliban heading towards us. ETA twenty minutes. Do you want us to engage?’