Chapter 26
'Crystalgate' as the press dubbed the affair, was kept alive in the media by something Jeff had said to the interviewer,
'Everyone makes mistakes, particularly when they're young. What's important is to apologise, learn from it and move on.'
As he was following up on his suspicions that Crystal's phone had been hacked, what he'd said was attacked in one of the tabloids in a vicious editorial penned by its hands-on owner. The opinion expressed was the usual: the royal family should set an example; they should be held to a higher standard which Jeff didn't cavil with; but the writer added 'she was only sorry now because she'd been caught, etc. etc.'
Woe betide anyone who upset Jeff. He was not only angry; he felt it was unfair to Crystal who was entitled to one mistake at least. He knew that even the courts give kids at least one break.
'Sanctimonious bastard,' he said as he read it.
Jeff went hunting for the woman journalist and a certain private detective who, past experience told him, could have been involved in hacking into Crystal's phone. Jeff knew the way hacking works. It's very simple: you pay people with access to information to sell it to you. If you want to get an unlisted phone number you pay someone in the phone company. If you want someone's unlisted address you can buy their private phone listing or the local council's ownership records. As Jeff knew, it's all very illegal. The method was well used and a common tool among a less than honourable type of media outlet.
Police used TV footage to identify the woman journalist who'd handed Jeff the note. He didn't know her but she was an experienced employee of one of those brands of paper that used to feature near nude women on page three of the evening edition; now they put them on page one.
She was brought in and questioned. The story about the source didn't hold up under close questioning by one of Jeff's less polite friends in the force and she admitted she'd been given the note to deliver to Jeff by her editor, who she said, did not seem to have a source. The editor had nothing to say when questioned.
'All right,' Jeff said, 'there are other ways.'
He had the private detective leant on; it wasn't hard as the fellow wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed and often came to Police attention for stealing mail from letterboxes and rifling in other people's garbage tins at four in the morning. After an interview in which he assisted police with their enquiries for a number of hours, he finally parted with the information that another member of the nosy for money brigade had been in touch, wanting to use one of his sources, an IT technician at Crystal's mobile phone provider.
From there it was a matter of a warrant to inspect the phone company's access logs and voila, the technician was recorded as accessing, without authority, Crystal's voicemails on the company server. The second private dick was hauled in and crumbled like a badly baked cookie. He had something to trade he said, photographs.
When you run with wolves your biggest fear is that the pack will turn on you; to avoid that you take out insurance. The photographs, the man said, were his insurance. After he'd retrieved them from a safe deposit box in the city he handed them over and made a full statement of all his dealings with the IT technician, the brief from the paper to get dirt on Crystal and how and when he'd taken the photographs.
In conference with his former boss and a number of highly ranked police officers, Jeff was of the view that it was highly unlikely the newspaper's owner or managing editor would admit any impropriety and the thing would die a slow death as any prosecution would be dragged out in court for years. They agreed. The only approach to take was personal.
It was very elegantly done in the end by Jeff's former boss who went up in his estimation. The interview was conducted, by invitation, in the boss's office, specially prepared for the occasion by MI5 who are geniuses with concealed recording equipment. Jeff watched on a monitor in an adjoining room with Crystal's grandfather, who insisted on being present,
'I knew that toe rag at school. I'll enjoy watching him squirm.'
The photographs, large glossies good enough for Hello! magazine, of the tabloid owner's daughter with a nose full of cocaine and more in an open bag beside her in a well known private club, were offered and inspected. Jeff's boss said to her father,
'That looks like a traffickable quantity to me. You get quite a stretch for trafficking.'
'What do you want?' the man asked. He personified the greatest hypocrisy: he criticised and publicly destroyed people but had no awareness of his own failings and those of his family which everyone watching knew had been kept out of the news by his considerable influence.
'Just an editorial, signed by you, saying the paper has taken rather a harsh position in relation to her Royal Highness which you, personally and on behalf of all your media outlets, apologise to her for. Most sincerely, etc. Don't forget that bit.'
'You will then go on to say in your carefully worded editorial that she is, like any other young person, entitled to a few mistakes in her youth. And, it won't hurt to say, and I've written it down for you so you don't forget, "We've all been through it with our children at one time or another".'
'Is that all?'
'Yes; so long as it's in tomorrow's morning edition and on the internet tonight.'
'God that felt good,' Jeff said.
'Absolutely,' Crystal's grandfather agreed.
Jeff told Crystal when he presented her with a brand new phone. Her old phone on which the Queen's former page, Jade, who had been supplying her with grass, had left a voicemail on the phone saying she had a new supply, was to be destoyed. It was only one message but it was enough once the hackers went to work.
'How stupid was I?' Crystal asked.
'One day I'll tell you about my misspent youth and then we'll be even.'
While she was distracted by the hacking of her phone Crystal forgot her grandmother's comment about her engagement ring. But her grandmother hadn't forgotten; she felt she'd seen the ring before. The histories of the jewels in the royal collection were a personal thing with her and the contents of the vault weren't just lifeless baubles; many of them were pieces with significant links to members of the family. They continued to live because she wore them and kept their stories alive.
She was glad Crystal had an old ring from Jeff's family: it made their commitment to each other all the more significant. Jeff's mother, Charlotte, had kept and passed the ring on as an heirloom; a link to past generations as was the Queen's own ring which had been fashioned from old stones her husband's mother had given him.
When she started to delve into her considerable knowledge of the family collection she for some reason remembered her father's great uncle, something of a black sheep who had died young. She tried to remember how.
'Oh yes,' she said, 'I do now. He went out to Australia when it was still very wild, an outpost; a repository for criminals. But that was only after something happened. What was it?'
The family archive was the place to go with that sort of question. Most of it was open to researchers and scholars but there were private papers that were not. It was there she would look. The curator was helpful and dug out a few old diaries of the time. One of them belonged to her long lost relative, kept for only a short period before he left the country for good. It was a very sad story he had written but common enough at the time.
He had wanted to marry a girl who was considered by the then King and Queen to be 'unsuitable'. They forbade the match and he wrote,
'Mother and Father gave their final pronouncement this evening, I cannot marry Charlotte. I will see her tomorrow and end it.'
There was nothing more in the diary but the curator found a bundle of letters written by the then Queen to her mother at around the same time. One of them said,
'Henry is broken hearted over the girl. It seems such a pity as he is so much in love and I hear she is sweet and good, but we have to be firm. A marriage with a commoner is not to be contemplated. I pray he'll see sense.'
The last letter in th
e bundle cleared up the mystery,
'Dear Mamma, Henry is gone to Australia. Oh, how I shall miss him. His secret engagement has been broken off and the girl's father assures us nothing will be said by them. Henry had given her a ring which he asked her to keep, the old cabochon emerald from his grandmother. It's so sad; so sad.'
The curator was able to tell the Queen what had happened to him,
'He was thrown by his horse and killed, droving cattle I believe. He's buried out there.'
Her Majesty went to the portrait gallery and found the picture she was looking for: there was Crystal's ring on the hand of her ancestor. It had come home.
Over tea with Jeff's mother she related the story which Charlotte hadn't known.
Jeff's mother told the Queen,
'The ring was just kept as was my name. The daughter named Charlotte inherited the ring. I've never worn it, it didn't seem to belong to me, but it does seem to belong to Crystal.'
'Strange isn't it, how things go full circle?' the Queen asked, 'And such an old connection between the families, it's very special.'
'It is,' she agreed, 'Very special.'