Stones of Treason: An international thriller Page 7
Barbra looked at Edward and shook her head. ‘Can’t say I have. But then I don’t care for ice-cream. Are you going to be long, darling? I’m hungry and I’m sure Edward is. You know how he adores pasta. Let’s go to Mimmo d’Ischia.’
‘Lunch, lunch, lunch. How you keep your figure and eat so much I’ll never know. Now, Edward, the price on this car is two million, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Should I buy it or should I buy a picture? Barbra wants a Schnabel.’
‘No contest, Dad,’ Edward replied at once. ‘I’m an art historian, for pity’s sake. I love pictures more than I love anything. It’s obvious. If that’s the choice – buy the car.’
*
Edward sipped the tea and wiped his lips with a napkin. He smiled inwardly. The tea was Ceylonese. So that was what was used at Buckingham Palace. It was just the kind of snippet the tabloid papers would pay a small fortune for. One of Mordaunt’s secretaries was pouring. Apart from her, there were two more people in his office: Lockwood and with him Sir Evelyn Allen, Cabinet Secretary.
As soon as they all had their cups, and the secretary had left, Lockwood began. ‘Sir Francis, Evelyn here has begun plans to ensure that this . . . problem will be dealt with. It isn’t easy. Even a secure headquarters, or operations room, is difficult. Number Ten is too public, Scotland Yard is too leaky . . . Still, we’ll have to manage somehow. The Home Secretary is having his people draw up a shortlist of men – detectives, security people – who are specialists in blackmail. For the moment, I think that’s all we can do until this Brigade makes contact. I do, however, have one – rather delicate – question.’
‘Thank you, Mr Lockwood, for your assistance so far. Very reassuring. What is your question?’
‘Money.’ Lockwood smiled a shade sheepishly. ‘As of now, we can’t be certain what the Brigade’s demands are going to be. But if it is money, as you seem to think . . . well, I know it may seem like treason for me even to utter this but . . . since Her Majesty is Queen, the blackmailers may be tempted to ask for a lot of money – a very great deal indeed. What I’m asking is two things really. Is there a limit to how much she would pay to prevent this scandal breaking? And do you have . . . can the Palace get a large amount of money quickly?’
There was a pause, into which Lockwood added, ‘Normally, I wouldn’t dream of –’
‘No, no. That’s quite all right, Mr Lockwood. I understand. But I can’t answer your first question. I simply don’t know if there’s a limit above which Her Majesty won’t go. And I’m not sure she does, either. We’ll just have to wait and see what demands are made. As to your second question, what sort of sums do you think we are talking about?’
Lockwood shrugged and looked at the Cabinet Secretary.
Allen said, ‘I understand that the world record for a ransom is seven and a half million pounds.’
Mordaunt scribbled the figure on a piece of paper. He used an immaculate, slender, silver propelling pencil.
‘I’m not sure that anyone would ask for much more than that,’ added Lockwood. ‘Assuming they ask for small denominations – say twenty-pound notes – and used bills, they probably couldn’t carry much more. Seven and a half million in twenty-pound notes would fill something like a hundred average briefcases. Say fifteen suitcases.’
Mordaunt nodded. ‘Let me offer this. There will be no problem with liquidity up to, say, twenty million pounds. After that, if it is necessary to pay and if Her Majesty decides to pay, we may need some time.’
Lockwood nodded. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I think we are as ready as we can be, save for the headquarters headache.’ He fixed Mordaunt with his gaze. ‘Perhaps Her Majesty could catch a chill this afternoon and could cancel all engagements tomorrow?’
‘We’ll do it,’ replied the equerry. ‘Of course we will. There might be some comment, though. You won’t have heard yet but Princess Margaret, who is in Mustique, has contracted some mysterious illness and is confined to her bed. If the Queen also goes down . . . well, you see what I’m saying.’
‘An unfortunate coincidence, I agree. But these things happen.’ Lockwood looked at Allen. ‘It’s not as big a problem as finding secure headquarters –’
‘May I say something?’
The Prime Minister looked irritated for a moment, and Mordaunt surprised. They all looked at Edward.
‘How many people would be needed in this “operations HQ”?’
Lockwood looked at Allen again. The Cabinet Secretary formed his mouth into a pout. ‘Two or three to begin with. More later, depending on what happens.’
‘We have a restorer’s studio in St James’s Palace,’ countered Edward. ‘It’s large and central. We have two full-time restorers on the household staff but one is at Balmoral and the other is at Windsor at the moment, and they will stay there as long as I tell them to. We often have specialist restorers working on particular problems – but in any case no one else ever goes into the studio. No one would notice if your policemen or security people were to move in there. All they would need to do is to wear white coats. Then they would look the part.’
The irritation had gone from Lockwood’s eyes. He turned to Allen. ‘How does that sound?’
‘Dr Andover is right. It’s central, discreet. And safer and easier to have police or intelligence people come to the palace than to have Andover and others frequenting somewhere they might be noticed.’
‘And we’ve had to tell Andover’s secretary.’ Mordaunt reimposed his presence on the room. ‘She’s first-rate and no security risk at all. She could help with routine.’
Lockwood stroked the crease in his cheek. ‘Thank you, Dr Andover. I will leave you and Evelyn to sort out the details.’ He turned back to Mordaunt. ‘I wouldn’t tell your press office the real reason Her Majesty is cancelling tomorrow’s engagements.’
‘Don’t worry, Mr Lockwood, our security is good here. I shall send for Her Majesty’s doctor and tell him she has diplomatic flu. She’s had that before, more than once, and he won’t ask for details. Speaking of illness, Prime Minister, may I enquire how your grandson is?’
Lockwood flashed a glance at Mordaunt. ‘I wish I knew, Sir Francis, I wish I knew. I’m told there’s to be a brain scan – tomorrow, perhaps. Maybe we’ll learn more then. It’s surprising how much these doctors don’t know . . . and worrying . . . but thank you for asking.’
They all stood up. ‘They made a formidable pair, the Duke of Windsor and Sir Anthony Blunt.’ The Prime Minister looked at the equerry. ‘I wonder which of them did the country more damage.’
*
‘Hello, machine. What a friend you are. Always there, always ready to listen, no complaints. Except for the sex angle, you’re perfect. I’d quite miss you if I was ever unlucky enough to speak to your master in person. Tell him I’m in Belton – that’s Lincolnshire. Sculptures by the Stantons, John Bacon and others. Ask your master if he knew that Bacon invented a secret material for carving very ornate bits on monuments – and that even today no one knows exactly what the material is made of. Incidentally, near the church with the Bacon sculpture is a place called Belton House. Weird! An entire exhibition devoted to the Duke of Windsor, with what they claim is the only portrait of him as Edward VIII. Your namesake, Woodie – but there the likeness ends. I hope. What a sad man! He obviously regretted abdicating all his life – you only have to see the photographs of him later on to understand that. I hope you are getting all these messages, Woodie. They’re costing me a fortune. So long.’
Edward pressed the button to reset the answering machine and tugged off his bow-tie. Tonight there had been a dinner at Christie’s to mark the imminent sale of what they called their ‘important impressionist’ pictures. The dinner had been the usual mix of mega-rich property tycoons, minor royalty and bony widows from Palm Beach, awash in diamonds and liver spots and held together by face-lifts. Plus three or four academics, like himself, to add respectability and authority to the evening. Edward had only gone because Nan
cy was still away. Otherwise he would have preferred a Big Mac in her company.
He poured himself the day’s last scotch (and, as it happened, the first). That crack of Nancy’s about the Duke of Windsor . . . bit of a coincidence. He swallowed some Dewar’s. Her information about John Bacon wasn’t new, not to him anyway. But he hadn’t known about the exhibition at Belton House. He was just about to take another drink when a thought struck him. Nancy had gone away just a day or two before the first parcel had arrived at St James’s Palace. Was Nancy’s reference to the Duke of Windsor really a coincidence? She couldn’t be mixed up in all this, surely? Was that why she had gone away just now? Another thought struck him: was that why he had been chosen as an intermediary?
Chapter Nine – Thursday
From The Times of London, Court & Social Page:
THE QUEEN HAS A CHILL
Official engagements cancelled
Princess Margaret also indisposed
The Queen is suffering from a slight chill, Buckingham Palace announced yesterday. There is no cause for alarm, said a spokesman. Professor Alastair Senior, the physician royal, had attended Her Majesty and recommended that she remain in bed for 48 hours.
As a result of the Queen’s illness, three official engagements for today have been cancelled:
11.15 am: The opening of an old people’s home at Enfield;
1.00 pm: A lunch for the mayors of five Pennine towns, at Buckingham Palace;
8.15 pm: The royal première for Picasso, Mr Ken O’Farrell’s film of the great painter, starring Karlheinz Tutov, at the Odeon, Leicester Square.
kensington palace: Princess Margaret, who is on holiday in Mustique, is confined to bed with what is believed to be mild food poisoning. She has been attended by the medical staff of the Royal Bridgetown Hospital, Barbados.
*
The red phone warbled. Edward snatched at it – but then forced himself to act slowly, more casually. He looked across at the two other men in the room, who lifted their earpieces. Edward counted to three and picked up the receiver.
‘Edward?’ It was The General’s voice.
‘Yes?’
‘I have Pieter van Zuylen for you. From the Rijksmuseum.’
‘Very well.’ Edward relaxed, nodded to the other two men, and they set down their earpieces. This wasn’t what they were waiting for.
As Edward chatted with the director of Holland’s venerable national gallery, his eyes roamed the room. It had been a natural enough suggestion of his that the operational headquarters be sited in St James’s Palace but, he had soon realized, he was only digging himself in deeper.
He had been introduced to the other two men in the room over a light – a very light – breakfast at Mordaunt’s house in Chester Square (the equerry ‘lived out’). For security’s sake he had dispatched his housekeeper somewhere and cooked the breakfast himself, if one could call brewing coffee and warming croissants cooking.
Bob Leith was the Scotland Yard man, a small Welsh terrier with dark hair that was thinning and through which could be glimpsed the rolling countryside of his scalp. He came with the Home Secretary’s stamp of approval as the Yard’s top operations man in the Serious Crimes Squad. ‘I’m told he has handled more blackmail cases than there are fake Utrillos,’ Mordaunt had confided to Edward just before Leith arrived. Edward supposed that was the equerry’s idea of a joke.
Kennedy O’Day was altogether different. Tall, bony and sandy-haired – those were the characteristics one noticed at first. From a distance, he was handsome, striking even. Close to, one took in the broken veins on his cheeks (drink?) and disconcerting wisps of hair abandoned on the bridge of his nose. Was it vanity or eccentricity that prevented him taking a razor to them? Intense blue eyes and small teeth with gaps in between made his a hard face, too. Where O’Day came from, what department of Whitehall (or the moon) he inhabited, had not been formally explained to Edward. It was not hard to guess, though, for he had arrived for breakfast with a diagram of St James’s Palace, showing the telephone points, and during breakfast he had taken a call from someone who was clearly his assistant and had apparently been at work in the palace during the night. This ensured, he said, that Edward’s calls could be put through to the studio.
O’Day had also double-checked Wilma Winnington-Brown’s background. ‘No money troubles, lives within her means, devoted to her children and the memory of her dead husband, who was a British observer in Vietnam. Likes gin and sherry, and puffs away like the original Royal Scot.’
‘I could have told you all that,’ Edward had replied, rather tetchily.
O’Day’s lips had widened into an alarming grin. The gaps in his teeth made his mouth resemble a small piano keyboard. ‘And has she told you that she once killed a man who tried to rape her? Brained him with an alabaster lamp that was handy.’ The grin spread over O’Day’s face again as he enjoyed the effect this information had on Edward.
Not that Edward was surprised for very long (the women in his life were full of surprises, he reflected). He could well imagine Wilma dispatching a rapist. In a way, it endeared her more to him.
Breakfast over, O’Day, Leith and Edward had transferred to St James’s Palace, one at a time. Inside the studio, Edward had moved a huge canvas by Canaletto so that anyone casually looking in would find the view blocked. The back of the canvas faced the door so that it would not be immediately obvious that precious little restoration was going on. During the night a bank of phones had been installed, each with two earpieces on long leads. Whenever an instrument rang, all three men could listen in.
At length, Edward put down the phone on van Zuylen. He prayed for something to happen. The Canaletto had been a talking point to begin with but it only highlighted the fact that the three of them had little in common. Edward had asked Leith early on for instructions when the call finally came through. The chief inspector had told him to act as naturally as possible.
‘Shouldn’t I try to keep the conversation going? So you can trace the call?’
Leith had pulled a face. ‘If you can. That’s what everyone thinks. If they are any good, the blackmailers will know it too. If they are even half-way professional, they will do all the talking, then ring off very quickly. We’ll try to trace the call – of course we will. But don’t expect miracles. I’ll be listening for clues – but mainly to get some idea of the characters we are dealing with. In blackmail, if this is regular blackmail, our best chance is always the handover of the money.’
They had lapsed into silence again and Edward had returned to his own preoccupations. He was specifically worried by something else, something which showed how corrupting this affair was already becoming. This was a short exchange he had had with Mordaunt before the others had arrived for breakfast. It had occurred to Edward that even if the blackmail was successful, then, even after paying out the sum that the blackmailers demanded, the Palace would still be left with a looted Raphael, a looted Poussin, a looted Canaletto and God knows what else on its hands. How would they explain that? Edward had wondered and had asked Mordaunt what they would do.
‘Well, we can’t return them to their rightful owners, can we?’ the equerry had replied, rather primly. ‘Too many awkward questions might be asked – how we came across them and so forth. The whole story might even leak out. No, I think the safest course would be to destroy them.’
Edward’s phone rang again, shaking him from his distasteful reverie.
Leith and O’Day reached for their earpieces. By the second ring they were both ready and Edward picked up the receiver.
‘Yes?’
‘Edward? An overseas call. I think so, anyway.’ Wilma spoke in a confidential tone. ‘He won’t give me his name but says you are expecting to hear from him. He says it’s about some Old Master pictures.’
This was it!
Edward looked across to the others and they both nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right, Wilma. This is the call we are waiting for. Put him through, please.’
‘Yes . . . yes. This is Andover. What can I do for you?’
The other voice chuckled. ‘You can do quite a lot for me, Dr Andover, oh yes. And I can do a great deal for you . . . for the Queen anyway. I take it you are familiar with the background to . . . this telephone call?’
Edward nodded at the phone. ‘Yes . . . yes, I am.’ Leith had pressed a button to alert his deputy so he could try to trace the call.
‘The first thing is to discuss the way we shall communicate. At the end of each conversation I shall give you a time and a location for the next call. I assume you are taping all this so I shall never repeat anything. Is that clear?’
‘Yes . . . No! what do you mean, location?’
‘Where are you now, Dr Andover?’
Edward paused. Fatally. ‘In my office, of course.’
‘Hmm. I doubt it. It doesn’t matter. Are you in central London?’
‘Yes.’
‘That had better be true. I’ll show you what I mean by giving you an example. I shall call again in an hour from now – but not on this number.’
‘What –?’
‘Listen! I shall call you, you, Andover, in precisely sixty minutes – at the public phone booths just inside the entrance to the British Museum.’
‘What on earth –?’
But the line had gone dead.
Edward held the receiver in his hand for a moment, looking at it. Then, gently, he replaced it. He looked across again at Leith.
The policeman shrugged. ‘Your conversation took sixty-five seconds. We need about twice that. This way our friend buys time: that means safety for him. Also, it wrong-foots you by putting you in unfamiliar territory. He’s hoping that might slow you down – mentally, I mean.’
‘What can be done about it?’
‘Nothing. We play along. Forget tracing the call, Dr Andover. Ten to one, it’s coming from abroad, and from a public booth. These days you can dial direct to almost anywhere from almost anywhere else. He’ll use a different phone next time, too. He’ll use a different phone every time. Calling from a public booth also makes our friend harder to trace.’