Mrs. Queen Takes the Train by William Kuhn Page B

expected her to be equally unconcerned about the request he was about to make of her. Usually, on days when he didn’t travel with The Queen, or when there were no engagements in the evening, he was in the palace from about ten in the morning until six at night, but this afternoon, he’d received a pressing letter from Andy’s mother. He wanted a few hours at home in his flat to reply to it properly. As The Queen had just returned that Monday morning from her weekend in Windsor, and there was nothing official on her program until Tuesday, he didn’t expect her to object to his leaving a few hours early. She was easy about things like that.
    The door to her sitting room was closed. It always was. Doors were seldom left open in the palace, another of his early discoveries. He stopped in the corridor, listened briefly at the door to see whether he could hear her talking to anyone on the telephone. He wouldn’t interrupt if she were, but there was nothing, not even the sound of the television. He fully expected to find her reading briefing papers at the desk while the dogs slept on the carpet. He tapped gently with his knuckle and waited for her reply.
    Instead of The Queen’s voice what he heard was a strange noise from the dogs. It was not unusual for his knock to make the dogs bark, but then he would hear her shushing them. Now they did not bark. They whined. He knocked again, which prompted somewhat louder whining from the dogs, and an isolated howl. He opened the door a crack to see the door to the garden terrace ajar, a December shower wetting the rug and blowing the curtains into the room. He walked in and shut the door into the garden. She’d clearly been here and was gone. Stepped outside for a moment? Gone for a walk in this weather? If she had, she would have taken the dogs with her. Instead, they waddled back and forth between the door and the center of the room, as if they were children shocked at their abandonment.
    Luke went to the telephone, dialed the number of palace security and asked where The Queen had gone. “In her sitting room,” came the reply down the line. Luke was impatient with the palace’s old-fashioned communication system. The man clearly could not see that he was already telephoning from The Queen’s sitting room. “No, I’m in her sitting room, and she’s not here,” said Luke with grim determination.
    “Oh, probably out walking the dogs,” came the careless reply from security.
    “No,” said Luke, “the dogs are here.”
    “Wouldn’t worry. She won’t have gone far.” The man rang off.
    Luke was fairly familiar with The Queen’s routine, and her aversion to deviating from it in the smallest way. She wouldn’t be anywhere else in the palace at this hour. The open outer door left only one possibility: she must have stepped outside. His current job was a desk job, but he could still summon up some strength from years of doing very little in his spare time but working out in an army gym. He went back and reopened the door. Buckingham Palace Gardens was itself the size of a small London park, but he thought he could jog around the perimeter quickly enough to satisfy himself that if The Queen had gone out, and for some reason not come back in, she was all right and needed no assistance. He sprinted down the stairs on to the wet gravel and jogged first around the edge of the gardens, and then down several of the central paths in twenty minutes, sleet mixed with rain stinging his face. With a rising sense of panic, he found nothing.
    He came back inside, winded, wet, and breathing hard. He knew rationally that now was the time to raise the alarm, but he did not trust palace security. It was not only that they were often lazy and inattentive, that they’d ignored The Queen herself when she’d sounded a buzzer to summon help some years ago after a lunatic broke into her bedroom before breakfast. It was Luke himself. Since he’d been back from Iraq, he trusted people less, and