‘I’m not ruling anything out at this stage,’ Grace replied.

  ‘But what could be the motive?’

  ‘You told me there are a lot of undercurrents within the Royal Household staff – is there something more serious we don’t know about yet?’

  ‘That’s possible – but there is also a great deal of respect and loyalty to both the bosses. I’ll find out what I can.’

  Grace sat in silence a few minutes after he ended the call. Never in his entire career, up until now, had he felt so out of his depth. The enormity of what he was dealing with was sinking in and seemed immense. Perhaps it would have been easier if Sir Tommy had told him that Their Majesties had thought he was a lightweight and wanted someone from the Met, who really knew what they were doing, to take over the case.

  He felt deeply honoured that he had the trust of both The King and The Queen. But what if he was wrong in his hypothesis and it actually was The Queen who had been the target?

  He was scared as hell.

  44

  Thursday 23 November 2023

  The huge vault, formerly used as a cold store in the days before fridges and freezers, was accessed past a wall of fuse boxes, and through a series of whitewashed interconnected arches, deep in the basement of Buckingham Palace. Now, instead of being kept cold it was being kept dry, by a battery of dehumidifiers.

  It was temporary home to a different kind of perishable from the food that would once have been stored here: oil paintings, some of which were here for safe keeping while the rooms where they normally hung were being renovated and redecorated. And others that were particularly old and delicate were occasionally rested here to protect them from too much exposure to light.

  In addition to paintings, a large number of ornaments and items of glassware were also being stored down here for safety during the renovations.

  But it was a picture that Sir Jason Finch, dressed as always in his three-piece chalk-stripes, had come down here to find. A black and white dog – a Newfoundland – painted by Sir Edwin Landseer in 1867. A similar size and subject had recently sold at auction for £1.1 million.

  He looked around with greedy eyes, bewildered, at the racks and racks of paintings, all in protective wrapping. Every single package worth tens or hundreds of thousands, or millions.

  ‘Sir Jason!’

  Startled, he turned at the sound of the haughty voice, to see the tall, elegant Director of the Royal Collection Trust, Lorraine McKnight, standing right behind him.

  ‘Lorraine – ah – hello – yes.’

  ‘Can I help you with anything, Sir Jason?’

  ‘Well – actually – ah – I was wondering – about – a Landseer – black and white – a Newfoundland dog – I – I wanted – to have a look at it.’

  She was giving him a strange look. ‘He was a fine painter,’ she said. ‘So talented with animals. Dogs, horses, stags.’ She was still looking at him oddly.

  ‘Yes, gosh yes, indeed. Animals. Landseer. Terrific painter.’

  ‘It’s rather coincidental,’ she said. ‘The Landseer Newfoundland dog – that’s the reason I’ve come down here – to try to locate it.’

  45

  Friday 24 November 2023

  Polly Sweeney rang the bell at the St James’s Palace residence of Lady Greaves and wondered what lay in store for her here today. She knew from long experience as a Family Liaison Officer that there were generally five stages of grief that a bereaved person went through – the times between each stage varying considerably, from days to weeks to months.

  The stages, although not necessarily linear, were defined as: denial; anger; bargaining; depression; acceptance.

  After the reception she and Roy Grace had had from Lady Greaves just two days ago, Sweeney was surprised when the door opened and she was greeted as if the very recent widow was actually pleased to see her. As if she had fast-tracked all the stages to reach acceptance.

  Lady Greaves was similarly dressed to before, in black: ‘widow’s weeds’, Sweeney thought, the old phrase sounding a bit irreverent in her mind. But it was often these little snippets of gallows humour that helped get her through the grim tasks her role demanded.

  Lady Greaves’ grey hair was styled as the last time, as if she had just come from the hairdresser, and she wore make-up that was heavily applied. But Sweeney took it as a positive sign she was taking care of her appearance. She followed her through into the drawing room they had been in two days earlier. The roll-top desk in the corner was now opened up and she saw a pile of letters, all, judging by the ones she could see from the opened envelopes, handwritten. Letters of condolence.

  After instructing the maid to get coffee for two, when they were settled on facing sofas, Lady Greaves quizzed Sweeney on the police progress in the investigation.

  ‘We have one very good witness, Lady Greaves,’ she answered.

  ‘I hope your team are not pursuing the theory of Peregrine being the target?’

  ‘Well, the thing is, a murder enquiry is partly a process of elimination,’ Polly Sweeney said with her usual tact.

  The maid appeared with the coffee and they waited in silence until she had departed. Then Lady Greaves said, ‘Quite so.’

  Sweeney, remaining pleasant, said, ‘I’d like you to help me in every way you can. I plan to interview you now and will record the details on my laptop on a statement form, which I will ask you to read and sign as an accurate record. This information needs to be accurate to the best of your knowledge as you may be asked to give evidence at any subsequent trial.’

  After a moment’s hesitation, the widow nodded.

  Polly gave her a reassuring smile before continuing. ‘Lady Greaves, what I need to know from you is more about your husband’s background. He was in the Navy, correct?’

  ‘He was, on a Short Service Commission. He spent much of his career there in Navy Intelligence.’

  ‘Could he ever in his service career have fallen out badly with someone? For instance, was he ever involved in any courts martial where someone might have held a grudge against him?’

  She shook her head vigorously. ‘No – absolutely not – nothing of that—’

  Then she stopped in mid-sentence. And for the first time Sweeney spotted a chink of self-doubt.

  ‘He did spend some time on attachment with the Government Communications HQ. Would that make him a spy?’ she asked, jokingly. ‘Perry loved codes – and cryptic puzzles. He would do the Times crossword every day and got annoyed if it took him more than ten minutes.’ She laughed, drily. ‘He kept a notebook – well, more of a diary – and he wrote everything in that in code – codes were a bit of a hobby of his.’ She fell silent for a moment, as though she was struggling with a thought she couldn’t process. Then she said, ‘I don’t know if I should even tell you this as it is only going to feed your misplaced theory.’

  Sweeney said nothing. Lady Greaves picked up her dainty bone china coffee cup and sipped. Then she said, ‘It was about two weeks ago, Peregrine came home in a very disturbed frame of mind. He told me that he’d heard something astonishing. Utterly astonishing. So astonishing he just did not want to believe it – could not believe it.’ She fell silent again.

  After some moments, Sweeney prompted her. ‘Did he tell you anything more?’

  ‘He said he was going to his study to write it up in his diary. In code, of course. I asked him to tell me what it was, but he said that if it was true, it would be utterly explosive. Then he said he could not believe it was true and he didn’t want to set off any kind of rumour mill.’

  ‘And he still wouldn’t tell you?’

  ‘You need to understand that Peregrine was a principled man, honoured to serve the late Queen and now their current Majesties. As well as being a very private man. He’d often get a bee in his bonnet about one thing or another in the Royal Household, but he never liked to talk about issues until after they were resolved. I used to beg him to share things with me, but it simply wasn’t his nature. He always used to quote that old Royal Navy maxim: Loose lips sink ships.’

  ‘You have his diary?’ Sweeney asked.

  ‘It’s in his study.’

  ‘Would you let us borrow it?’

  Margot Greaves shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not. But you’d need a damned good code-breaker to read it. I’ve had a go – I enjoy a bit of Sudoku, all that stuff. But I’ve never been able to finish a Times crossword, let alone decipher a page of his diary.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘He could have recorded all kinds of affairs in it. And I wouldn’t have had a clue!’

  ‘Let’s hope he didn’t,’ Polly Sweeney said, and smiled back as she continued the interview.

  ‘He wasn’t that kind of a man,’ Margot Greaves retorted. ‘Trust me. All he cared about was his duty to The King and The Queen. He was that rarest of people – a truly good human being.’

  46

  Friday 24 November 2023

  There was a game Lorraine McKnight played some nights, when she lay awake in the small hours, worried, her brain whirring, unable to get back to sleep. These sleepless episodes were happening more and more just recently, and they had started, she supposed, soon after the renovations to Buckingham Palace had commenced.

  A trustee of the National Gallery and the former Head of Fine Art at Sotheby’s, she had been the Director of the Royal Collection for the past eight years. In this role she was responsible for all the paintings and miniatures, prints, drawings, sculptures, furniture, ceramics, glass, silver, gold, jewels, books, manuscripts, textiles, photographs and historic weapons and armour held by the Royal Family and curated by the Royal Collection Trust. There were well over one million items, spread over thirteen palaces and houses, and it was one of the most important art collections in the world.

  Her game, rather than counting sheep, was to try to tot up the combined value of everything she was responsible for in her current role. And she was responsible for every single item. After just a few minutes it usually did work and she would be fast asleep. But not last night. She’d lain awake for a long time thinking back to some hours earlier when she’d discovered Sir Jason Finch down in the vaults where some of the Royal Collection’s most valuable works of art and pieces of jewellery were being stored for safety during the renovations.

  He’d seemed embarrassed by her presence, almost like a schoolboy caught in the act of doing something furtive. And, she had reflected repeatedly during the long night, he seemed to have gone to unnecessary lengths to explain – almost as if he had a pre-prepared excuse for being down there. But as, effectively, the Chief Finance Officer, the completely trusted Keeper of the Privy Purse did not need an excuse – he was entitled to go anywhere in the damned Palace that he chose.

  Now, at 8.55 a.m., after having walked their boys to school, the statuesque forty-seven-year-old was on her morning commute, pedalling the ancient sit-up-and-beg bike she loved, in breezy sunshine across Hyde Park.

  It took her twenty minutes from their home in the less fashionable part of Notting Hill she shared with her husband, the boys and a dachshund called Tilly (who was recovering from slipped disc surgery), towards where she would take her life in her hands, and cycle around a section of Marble Arch rather than use the underpass. From there she would whizz down the Constitution Hill cycle path towards the entrance – and sanctuary – of Buckingham Palace, or a short distance on to her office in St James’s Palace.

  It was funny, she was thinking today, how you could both love and hate your job at the same time. She loved that she got to work with so many stunning paintings, the Vermeer and the Canalettos being among her favourites, as well as so many truly extraordinary objets d’art, many gifted to the Royal Family over countless generations – wedding presents, state visit cultural gifts, and in the past, noblemen seeking favours.

  But she hated that the renovations, which had started seven years ago and were part of a ten-year programme – albeit under the very able control of the highly respected, and fun, Master of the Royal Household – had made a nightmare of her inventory.

  When she had first joined, she could have stated with confidence, if she’d been required to, exactly where every single one of those million-plus items were. Now it had become a logistical nightmare, with stuff being moved all over the place – sometimes by the craftsmen in the Palace – and frequently without her authorizing it. And, in addition to that, wherever renovations were taking place, the ever-present risk of fire increased, especially in such an old building as the Palace. And she was the one who had to make the decisions about which items should be saved first in – God forbid – the event of such a calamity. All of these had to be listed and labelled with a Salvage sticker. Memories of the fire at Windsor Castle in 1992, which destroyed one hundred rooms and countless treasured items, still haunted the Royal Collection team.

  On Monday she’d at least been able to respond competently to Sir Tommy Magellan-Lacey, when he had called her to say that The King was wondering where his beloved Landseer, which normally hung in the breakfast room at Clarence House, had gone. She was able to inform him that the painting had been taken down – as it was routinely – to be checked for condition, to ensure it wasn’t suffering any damage from light or humidity in its current location.

  But she had been on a lot shakier ground when, on Wednesday, The Queen had called her to ask why the Vermeer that was normally in the Picture Gallery had been replaced with a Fragonard. Not only was she unable to tell Her Majesty why the painting had been taken down, but in her subsequent enquiries, Lorraine was unable to even locate it.

  It would turn up, she knew, as would several other high-value items that had gone on the missing list recently – dismissing the fleeting thought that Jason Finch could possibly have had anything to do with that. She just hoped that Tommy didn’t suddenly go on the warpath, and come to her demanding to know where they were. Hopefully he had enough on his plate right now in the aftermath of Monday’s nightmare events.

  But she would make it her very first task today to locate the missing Vermeer from the Picture Gallery and get that Landseer back on the wall in Clarence House as an absolute priority.

  47

  Friday 24 November 2023

  ‘Oh yes,’ the diamond cutter muttered and nodded, peering through his monocular loupe at the magnificent oval diamond on the small velvet pad.

  He laid down the loupe and put his glasses back on. They were tiny, round and black, reminding her of the kind that might have been worn by a 1930s university professor.

  The cutter was in his early seventies, slight and bald, dapperly dressed in a grey suit and knitted tie, and very self-assured. A force of nature, crackling with energy despite his years, just like the diamond, way older than both of them combined, which sparkled so intensely it looked almost alive and moving. He was lord of his small but rich domain, the narrow office with long viewing shelves – diamonds did not need a big office, he always said. It felt an oasis of calm here, two floors above London’s Hatton Garden, the epicentre of the UK gem trade in the heart of busy, lunchtime-traffic-snarled Holborn.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he muttered again. And then a third time, nodding increasingly enthusiastically. His name was Gary van Damm, scion of a diamond trading and cutting dynasty. He only knew her as Mrs Smith. He didn’t know her real name, never had and never asked, despite the fact they had been doing business for over a year – extremely good business!

  Secrecy and trust, two of the platforms on which the global diamond trade was founded. All their communications were via the dark web and all his payments to her were in Bitcoin. Payments in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and very occasionally even higher. As today would be.

  ‘So nice to see one of these again,’ he said. ‘Granny’s Chips! Or rather, to be strictly accurate, one of Granny’s Personal Chips! Do you know the story?’

  ‘I don’t think I know the full story, no,’ she replied.

  ‘You are familiar with the legendary Cullinan diamond – the largest rough diamond ever found?’

  ‘Of course. It was cut up and the two largest stones – known as Cullinan I and Cullinan II – are part of the Crown Jewels.’

  ‘Correct. In 1905 the diamond came out of a mine in Cullinan, South Africa – it weighed 3,106 carats. And its colour was perfect. In today’s money it would have been worth about thirty-seven million pounds.’

  She raised her eyebrows.

  ‘At that time the most famous diamond cutter in the world was a Dutchman called Joseph Asscher – actually a rival to my great-grandfather. His cutting process produced nine major stones from the Cullinan diamond, as well as ninety-six smaller ones, most of which are now part of the British Crown Jewels – such as that big stone you’ll have seen in the Sceptre. But . . .’ He raised a finger, giving a knowing smile. ‘Some of the stones, of a very nice size indeed – this being one – fell between the cracks.’

  ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘No one is quite sure. The late Queen Elizabeth loved diamonds, as did her mother, and it’s quite possible either of them – or indeed Queen Mary before them – held them back for personal use. And why not!’

  ‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it!’

  ‘But save the receipts!’ he retorted with a grin.

  In response to her puzzled frown, he explained, ‘It’s a Yiddish expression.’

  ‘Ah!’ She smiled. ‘The two biggest remaining stones, Cullinan III and Cullinan IV, were made into a brooch by Queen Mary, and then handed down to her granddaughter Elizabeth – our late Queen.’

  ‘Correct,’ van Damm said. ‘Hence the jokey moniker “Granny’s Chips”. Its value today is around sixty-five million pounds, if not more. The last time I saw it was in 1981. The late Queen, God bless her, wanted to wear it at the marriage of Prince Charles to Diana, but it had some slight damage – I was asked to polish the damage out. Which of course I did. But there’s something that not many people know.’ He smiled, raised a finger, and winked conspiratorially.