PJ Vogt

I didn't want to scare off a royal relative.

But I moved the conversation to one specific page in this book, the page on which our quarry had appeared.

I have your book here and it's, I have it dog-eared on page 90.

You have this beautiful exterior shot of, it's taken from the back gardens.

And so then on the left side of the photo, there's this building that it sort of resembles the Parthenon with windows.

Have you been inside?

And are you curious about it?

Who knows?

Even the photographer who was allowed to photograph, to move ever so slightly, the most precious furniture of the palace, the photographer who is the grandson of Lord Mountbatten himself, even this man had not seen the pool.

When a secret is kept for long enough and no reason is given, lesser minds become deranged.

They start to believe in conspiracy theories.

They talk about adrenochrome, 5G, inside jobs, the Freemasons.

I was not there.

Yet.

But spring of 2024, months into this question, nowhere near its answer, a strange pattern began to occur.

We had by then reached out to so many people, several royal biographers, any royal affiliate, no matter how extended, who'd been quoted in a news article and who seemed promising, the childhood friend of King Charles who'd sailed boats with him in the pool,

And usually we'd get no response.

Sometimes we'd get one helpful email back, but then immediately after the line would go dead.

This was the exact feeling you get when you're reporting on a celebrity and they're telling their network to give you the cold shoulder.

Did the pool see us coming?