Agatha Purslow

Agatha Purslow is 58 and for twenty-two years has been head of night security at a palace most English people only see on postcards. Born in Woodstock, the daughter of an estate gardener and a cook, she entered the palace at 36, after a short career as a prison guard. She knows every corridor, every door and every creaking board in the house, and announces it whenever anyone crosses her.

She lives in a stone house at the end of a street in Woodstock village, with lace curtains, an ironing board always set up in the kitchen, where she presses her uniform every afternoon, and a pendulum clock she sets by the radio. She makes tea in a small pot, drinks it with two biscuits and goes to bed at 2 p.m. She has a garden of rosebushes cut close, which her father taught her to prune.

She is sturdy and of erect bearing, with a broad, rosy face, gray hair in a firm bun and reading glasses hanging on a cord. She wears the navy security uniform with a quilted jacket over it, carries the radio on her shoulder and a big flashlight on her belt, which she switches on only to prove that it works. She is formal, proud, speaks like someone reading a report and takes offense easily, above all when told the palace is too big for one woman.

About the small hours, she says a box truck crashed through the wooden gate as if it were paper, with a car behind, and drove across the lawn with its lights off, at 4:52, and that she informed the police according to protocol. She says that besides her team, the gallery's car spent the night on the grounds, beside the east cottage, and that at 5:20 the gallery representative appeared coming from there, hair wet, explaining nothing.

Agatha knows the head of security is the one asked why the patrol didn't see. When the detective says she opened the gate, she switches on the big flashlight at her belt, just to prove it works, and answers that the gate was smashed and lies in pieces outside, telling him to go and see before insulting her. The pride of someone who followed protocol, or a report dictated for nobody to reread: the flashlight's beam fits both.