Life Worth Living (38 page)

‘How’s your father?’ she asked.

‘He died.’

‘So when’s the funeral?’

‘It’s come and gone. I just got back from Jamaica last week.’

‘You went to Jamaica without telling me?’ she said, so angrily that my ears pricked up. ‘I had plans for you, I mean for them, when you were in Jamaica. Why did you do that?’

‘You haven’t been yourself lately, and I felt it would have been inappropriate to contact you,’ I said enigmatically.

Although I couldn’t put my finger on it, there was something going on with her that was making me very uncomfortable. I resolved to see as little of her as possible until she had sorted herself out. And indeed, from then until my lawyer received notice that Westminster had initiated court proceedings, I saw virtually nothing of Rosebud and spoke to her only when she telephoned me. We did exchange presents, and she did grill me about when Isabel, the new nanny, was leaving for Spain and when she would be returning. I gave her the date of Isabel’s departure, though not of her return, and this was what trapped Rosebud and led to her unmasking as the culprit.

Rosebud’s attempt to gain custody of my children had required careful planning, and she is nothing if not a shrewd calculator. Before the old nanny walked out, Rosebud had come round, tipped off by the nanny, when I was away from home, messed up the flat and taken photographs of her handiwork. She had sent the photographs to Westminster City Council as proof that the children were living in ‘squalid conditions’. But providence worked in my ultimate favour by presenting her with a second opportunity to take misleading photographs of the flat.

She had offered to babysit on 22 November while I went to a funeral. This time, however, there was no nanny there for me to
blame when I returned home and saw that things had moved, including some papers on top of my desk.

‘I don’t understand how you could have allowed the children to climb all over the place and play on top of my desk and in the drawers,’ I said, irritated. If I had known what she had really been doing at the desk – rifling through my papers and photocopying material such as Dima’s Jamaican travel document and anything else relating to the boys she thought might be useful for a future date – she might not have emerged alive.

Mistakenly believing that her tainted evidence was enough to hang me, Rosebud then wrote a letter, dated 22 November, to Westminster City Council, in which she stated that she was a good friend with intimate knowledge of me and the household I ran. She claimed that the children were dressed in rags and lived in squalor. She said that I had an excellent nanny who was about to leave, and that once she did the children’s health and welfare would be in jeopardy, since I knew nothing about caring for myself, a house or children. She claimed I loved my dogs more than the children, and that I allowed the dogs to bite the children, whom I would then reprimand for having annoyed the dogs. She alleged that as a result the children were covered in deep bite marks. There were other allegations of a more puerile nature, all calculated to shore up her request that Westminster City Council embark upon an urgent investigation of me.

Rosebud had previously got Westminster City Council to take the freeholder of her flat to court. She had told me then that she had a friend in their legal department who would ‘do anything’ for her. As matters developed, I had cause to remember that remark though I am casting no stones at anyone there. Rosebud turned out to be so manipulative and calculating that she could easily have convinced someone that they were embarked upon the Christian equivalent of a
jihad
, when all the while she had them sacking a lone mother’s family.

Prior to the first court hearing, which was held at the Marylebone Family Court on 11 February 1995, Westminster had to give us discovery of the documents they were relying upon to make their case. They handed over Rosebud’s letter, in which she had used the agreed alias of ‘Mrs Forbes’, and the photographs she had taken in my flat. When I finally got sight of the letter, what struck me most was how much this woman hated me. Not only did she want to strip me of my children, she was also asking them to take away my dogs! That aside, I still had no idea who the informant was. As Charles Buss said, ‘It’s easy to find out the identity of someone who is speaking the truth. You recognise what they’re saying and you place them accordingly. But it’s virtually impossible to discover who’s behind a series of fantasies, for none of what they describe happened, and so you can’t match up scenario with identity.’

Meanwhile, Charles was trying to get the lawyers for Westminster to see that they had nothing to lose by divulging the identity of the informant, which was known to them. ‘If it turns out that she’s speaking the truth, she has nothing to fear,’ he reasoned. ‘And if she’s not been telling the truth, you should
want
to unmask her, for she’s not only been saying the most diabolical things about an innocent woman, but she’s wasted your time and public funds. In those circumstances, surely you would not want to protect someone who has made a fool of you?’

Sound though Charles’s rationale was, Westminster did indeed want to protect Rosebud, for reasons we did not then understand. We had no way of knowing that Rosebud and her friend at the council had fired up everyone else at Westminster to believe that orange was pink. It was the social worker who inadvertently led me to Rosebud. In her statement, she revealed the complaints made by the phoney Mrs Forbes and one pertinent fact: the date I had given Rosebud for Isabel’s departure at Christmas.

Although I had another culprit in mind, as soon as I saw that detail, I strongly suspected Rosebud. To confirm my suspicions, I needed to get her to show her hand. On 2 February, the court had appointed a guardian ad litem, a social worker who was supposed to act as a protector of the children’s interests. She was also in touch with ‘Mrs Forbes’. I telephoned Rosebud, as if nothing were wrong, and had a friendly conversation with her, telling her a few lies about our intended movements in the hope that these would get back to the guardian ad litem and she would ask me about them. The social worker, however, was too cautious to reveal specifics.

Meanwhile, even though Rosebud’s plan to get hold of the children had failed, she kept in touch with Westminster Social services, keeping the fires burning with further untruths about me and the children. Whether her objective was to try a new formula now that I had wrecked her old one, or whether it was merely the malicious actions of someone who had been thwarted, I shall never know. But the social worker accepted these complaints as gospel, even when she knew that I was down in the country, so Rosebud could not possibly have seen me and the children in town. By now, of course, the court case was semi-public knowledge, but I did not discuss it in detail with Rosebud and she had no idea that I suspected her. I was careful, on the rare occasions we were in contact, to remain as cordial as possible. It was the only way of smoking her out.

Pleased that we seemed to be back on good terms, she tried to exploit the situation. On 13 February, the day of the first hearing, she telephoned. ‘Can I drop in tomorrow for two minutes? I want to drop off the boys’ belts. I won’t keep you long.’

‘You don’t have to limit yourself to two minutes,’ I said pleasantly. ‘After all, we’re friends and we haven’t been seeing enough of each other for the last few months.’

That evening I telephoned the other person I suspected of being the informant. This was the social-climbing opportunist who had misrepresented my mission in Russia to Nigel Dempster.

‘Oh, Georgie, darling girl, I’m so glad you’ve phoned. I’m thrilled that you’ve finally forgiven me. You have forgiven me, haven’t you?’

‘That depends,’ I said.

‘What can I do? I’ll do anything, anything at all. You tell me and I’ll walk over hot coals for you.’ I hoped the friend who was listening in on the extension as a witness wouldn’t laugh out loud.

‘I only phoned to tell you that I might consider dropping my action against Nigel Dempster if you sign the affidavit stating that neither you nor any friend of yours has been in touch with the social services about me and my children.’

‘Anything, anything, anything, Georgie dear. As long as you don’t flash it around London and forgive me and we can be friends again.’

Clearly she wasn’t the mysterious Mrs Forbes. ‘That, I fear, is an impossibility. Nothing will ever induce me to be friends with you again.’

The following morning, Rosebud arrived just as I was dressing to go to Sandown Park races, where I was due to present a trophy to the winner of the Libel and Slander Stakes. Before she even had time to catch her breath, I said, ‘You know, some people have told me in all seriousness that they believe you’re the informant.’

‘Me? I’m your good friend. I’ve always tried to protect you.’ Against what I wondered. ‘Only a monster could betray a friend like that.’ She went on and on about how hurt she was that I might even begin to suspect her, fulminating so convincingly that I began to doubt my instincts. But the following morning, she made her big mistake. At the crack of dawn, she telephoned me. ‘Don’t say a word over the phone. Come and see me later. At my flat. I’ve got news for you.’

As soon as I arrived the affair took an even more ridiculous turn. Rosebud launched into a long diatribe about how she had been protecting me from the powers that be, whom I had offended by writing
Diana in Private
and
The Royal Marriages
. She tried to get me to believe that she knew through her contacts at the palace that MI5 was behind the plot to deprive me of the children.

‘Your phone is bugged, you know. You’ve made a lot of powerful enemies,’ she said. ‘But I’ve asked friends from my days at the palace to intercede on your behalf.’

‘Really, Rosebud,’ I said. ‘If you think MI5 would invent such a plot you’re living on Mars.’

‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘Wait. I’ll show you some documents they passed to me.’

With that, she went and fetched the papers from my desk she had photocopied herself when she was babysitting on 22
November. As well as Dima’s Jamaican travel document, there were copies of letters of instruction which Judy Ann MacMillan and I had written to the nanny before she left the West Indies to make her first plane journey easy for her.

As soon as I saw those letters, I knew that the nanny and Rosebud had been in cahoots and that Rosebud was, beyond all shadow of a doubt, the informant. ‘If Immigration gets hold of these documents, they’ll prosecute you for bringing the nanny into the country illegally,’ she said. ‘I’ve asked my friends to block the prosecution.’

‘The nanny wasn’t in this country illegally, Rosebud,’ I said patiently. Now intent on getting as much information out of her as I could, I was careful not to betray my new-found knowledge of her complicity.

‘I thought she was?’

‘If so, it’s news to me. As a Jamaican citizen, I’m allowed to have Jamaican domestic servants here.’

‘She was a nanny, not a domestic servant,’ she said, bristling.

‘The papers I filled out for her at the British High Commission categorised her as a domestic servant. If you have an objection, take it up with them, not me,’ I replied silkily, pleased that I was dancing on a sore spot. ‘But I don’t see what all of this has to do with the children.’

‘Do you remember the photographs?’ she asked.

‘I most certainly do,’ I said, delighted that she was bringing up a subject I had never mentioned to her. That meant only one thing: she had supplied them.

‘You think they were all taken at the same time, but they weren’t. You go back and look at them, and you’ll see that some were taken in the daytime and others at night.’

This was interesting. I had mentioned this supposition to the guardian ad litem. I played Rosebud along a little longer, then thanked her for all the helpful information she had given me. We kissed goodbye and I promptly telephoned my lawyer. ‘Rosebud is the informant. She’s familiar with the photographs and has information to which only the guardian ad litem is privy,’ I said, recounting the conversation.

‘I’ll give her a ring,’ my lawyer said.

‘You do that. Let her know her cover’s blown.’

I still did not know what Rosebud’s motive was. I presumed she was trying to protect herself against exposure as a source for
Diana in Private
. Although her information had been limited, and I had offered her anonymity, I had in my possession hours of tapes of her singing like a bird about Oliver Everett, Diana’s first private secretary; Michael Colborne, Assistant private secretary to the Prince of Wales; Edward Adeane, Charles’ private secretary; Diana; her mother, Frances Shand-Kydd; and
Charles himself, for whom she had open contempt. She had signed the Official Secrets Act when she worked as a junior in one of the corridors of power and was in danger of prosecution, and possibly imprisonment, if her identity became known during the pursuit of my
Sunday Express
breach-of-contract action.

My lawyer now had a lengthy conversation with her, at the start of which he made it clear that I was going to sue her for libel. When she saw that denial was pointless, she tried to find a way out of the hole she’d dug for herself. To say that I was stunned by Rosebud’s conduct would not begin to describe the way I felt. I had genuinely believed us to be friends. Of course, I was aware that she had used me socially, to mix in a world to which she would otherwise not have had access, and to try to peddle a mini-series about Margaret Argyll’s life. But Margaret had wanted it made, so I had not minded being of use. After all, if you don’t want to help your friends who do you want to help?

I was reading the papers in the sitting room early that evening when Rosebud rang me. I could hardly believe that she had the temerity to contact me now that she was unmasked.

‘Georgie, it’s Rosebud,’ she said. ‘Don’t hang up until you’ve heard what I have to say.’

‘What possessed you to do it?’ I asked.

‘Why should you have everything?’ she snapped.

‘But I don’t see what the purpose was.’