The Last Queen of England: A Genealogical Crime Mystery #3 (Jefferson Tayte)

by Robinson, Steve

Tayte shook his head, thinking that his friend could be so embarrassing at times, and just for once he wished he’d call him JT.

  “It’s called, Across the Pond,” he said. “It focuses on the ancestral ties between America and the UK. I figured that as so many non-native Americans can trace their roots back to the UK, there should be a market for it.”

  Jean nodded. “Maybe I can get you to sign a copy for me someday.”

  Tayte felt his cheeks flush and laughed at the idea.

  When Marcus settled the bill ten minutes later, Tayte thought he looked far too pleased with himself, supposing that the blind date was no doubt money well spent to his mind. The black-suited attendant waiting for them by the door helped Jean into her coat, and through the grey windows Tayte could see that it had started to rain. He rarely wore a coat, but on this occasion he chided himself for forgetting how damp London could be. He didn’t realise Marcus had fallen behind until he turned around to ask how long they had before the show. His first thought was that he’d intentionally dropped back to give him and Jean a moment to themselves - another of his matchmaking ploys - but when his eyes found his friend again he wasn’t so sure.

  A slim, fair-haired man wearing blue jeans and an untucked black shirt was sitting at the bar with a leggy brunette who looked like she hadn’t long left school. He had to be close to Marcus’s age, Tayte thought, although he gave the impression he was trying to look closer to the girl’s. He had one hand on her St. Tropez-tanned thigh and the other was on Marcus’s arm. The man was talking through his smile as though he’d just bumped into an old friend, but Marcus did not return the smile. Tayte watched his friend jerk his arm free and he was about to go and see if he needed any help when Jean distracted him.

  “How long are you in London?”

  Tayte turned to her. “Marcus didn’t tell you?”

  “I suppose he thought it would be nice if I found something out for myself.”

  Tayte glanced back at Marcus. The other man was still smiling. It all seemed amiable enough apart from the body language and there was something about that smile that made Tayte uneasy. Marcus looked tense and Tayte wished he could hear what they were saying. He wanted to step closer but he was suddenly aware that he was ignoring Jean, so he tried to stay with the conversation.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I fly home tomorrow night, after the convention. Did Marcus invite you to that, too?”

  Jean nodded. “I said I’d get back to him.”

  “I know what you mean. Genealogy conventions aren’t everyone’s idea of a fun day out.”

  “That’s not quite what I meant.”

  It took Tayte a while to realise what she did mean. “Oh,” he said. He laughed to himself. “See how this date goes first, right?”

  “Something like that.”

  He was about to ask her if she’d made a decision, but when he turned and looked into the restaurant again he saw that Marcus was heading towards them. Tayte thought he looked troubled, but as if to contradict his take on the situation, the fair-haired man at the bar was still smiling.

  “Anything wrong?” Tayte asked.

  Marcus shook his head. “No, just an old acquaintance I’d rather not have bumped into today.” He took his coat from the attendant and slipped it on over his sports jacket. “Come on, let’s get a cab and go see that show.”

  Tayte snapped his collar up as soon as his loafers hit the wet pavement outside. Maiden Lane was a narrow street, lined with four-storey buildings that had a few shops and other eateries at ground level. He left Jean and Marcus sheltering beneath the restaurant canopy and went to secure the black cab he’d seen towards Covent Garden. Despite the rain the area was busy with sightseers and shoppers, many of whom were linked in pairs between their umbrellas, eating up the pavement. Somewhere ahead he could hear a street performer laughing into a PA system as he told his audience not to try this at home.

  He pushed out onto the road between the cars that were parked bumper-to-bumper along the kerb. The taxi he had his eye on - the only taxi he could see - was further down than it first looked. He waved as he drew closer and he had to smile to himself when someone else got in and the taxi pulled away. He looked back towards the restaurant as another black cab turned into the street.

  Touchdown, he thought.

  Being the big Washington Redskins fan he was, Tayte started to run for that touchdown now, the cool sensation on his back letting him know that he would soon be soaked to the skin if he didn’t make it. The taxi’s light was on, which was a good sign. He supposed it was making a drop off and he wished it would slow down so he could be there waiting for it when it did. He picked up his pace a little but soon had to slow down again. He was panting by half way.

  “Still gotta lose a few pounds, JT,” he told himself, having lost count of the number of times he’d said that.

  The taxi stopped in the street directly outside Rules restaurant and when Tayte saw Marcus and Jean make a beeline for it he smiled to himself again and thought how typical that was. If he’d wanted to impress Jean, he’d just failed miserably. He stopped running and tried to control his breathing as he walked, returning Marcus’s wave as the driver got out of the taxi.

  That was when Tayte knew something was wrong.

  A taxi driver getting out of their vehicle for a customer without baggage was unusual enough, but this man, dressed in a long black coat, was wearing a full-face plastic mask: the kind you buy in a novelty shop. The dark-haired figure walked casually around the front of the car towards the restaurant, and Tayte could see now that he had no passenger, so he wasn’t dropping off. He also knew that black cabs didn’t usually operate on a private hire basis, so the driver wasn’t there to pick up a prearranged fare. And why the mask?

  The first gunshot didn’t seem real.

  Tayte froze and just stood in the road as he watched the action unfold, as though he’d just stepped into a movie set. All of a sudden he could smell the rain in the air, mingling with the kitchen fumes from the vents along the street. People around him began to run as others crouched and kept still. A woman screamed somewhere nearby and a young boy began to cry. Tayte saw them through a gap between the cars: the mother holding the boy to her with one arm while the other held out an umbrella like a shield, useless as that would be.

  Then slowly, still unable to believe what was happening, Tayte turned back to the man in the mask. His gun was levelled at Marcus. There can’t have been more than six feet between the two of them. His friend was clutching his shoulder where the first bullet must have struck. He watched Marcus shake his head at the gunman, slowly and purposefully. Pleading. All Tayte could think about was that his friend needed him and he was too far away to help. His awareness was so heightened that he thought he saw the second bullet leave the muzzle, and the sound it made brought everything into painful reality.

  No! Tayte yelled, but no sound came out. He began to run again, eyes fixed on Marcus as he watched his friend stagger and fall. He saw Jean then. Marcus was down and she was beside him, looking up at the man in the mask as Tayte watched him turn the gun on her. He didn’t think about it. He jumped at the nearest car and slid across the wet bonnet, falling hard onto the pavement on the other side. The gunman seemed to be taking his time over Jean. At least, that’s how it looked to Tayte. He saw him stoop to pick up Marcus’s briefcase, the gun trained on Jean’s head the whole time. As Tayte picked himself up he grabbed a shopping bag from someone beside him and hurled it.

  “Hey!”

  The bag landed short and spilled its contents, scattering several CD cases. Then Tayte was running again and he had no idea if he’d make it. He had all the man’s attention now and being closer he could see that the mask he was wearing was a comedy caricature of Prince Charles. It was surreal. He took in the big ears for a split second and then all he could think about was the gun that had now turned on him. He didn’t stop. He didn’t know why but he just kept running, thinking that although they had only just met, at
least he’d bought Jean some time to get away.

  The shot came instantly.

  Tayte knew it had missed him when he heard a car windscreen shatter. The sound of the glass breaking startled him more than the shot itself. Ahead, Jean was on her feet, recoiling from the shove she must have given the gunman as he squeezed the trigger. Now the man was running back to the taxi and Tayte silently thanked Jean for choosing fight over flight, if she’d really had a choice.

  As Tayte arrived beside her and the taxi sped off in a screech of tyre rubber they exchanged brief glances and turned their attention to Marcus. Tayte removed his jacket and dropped to his knees. He sat and held his friend in his arms with his jacket pressed to his chest. There was so much blood washing out over the pavement with the rain that Tayte was surprised his friend was still alive. His eyes were wide open, his glasses spattered with blood on the pavement beside him.

  “Marcus? Can you hear me?”

  Tayte got something back. It could have been, “JT,” but he wasn’t sure.

  “Marcus! Stay with me, you hear?”

  A crowd began to gather around them. People were pouring out of the restaurant.

  “An ambulance is on its way,” Tayte told him, speaking slowly as he looked around for one of the restaurant staff, hoping it was true. Someone nodded back at him. “Just stay with me, Marcus. Stay with me.”

  Marcus drew a sharp breath and coughed. “My briefcase,” he said, struggling to get the words out through the inky blood that was bubbling from his lips.

  Tayte shook his head. “It’s gone.”

  “You must find it.”

  “Don’t worry about it now.”

  Marcus closed his eyes and somewhere in the real world Tayte heard a siren. It seemed to stir his friend again. He felt his fingers bite into his arm.

  “Treason!” Marcus said, his eyes locked in a faraway stare. “Hurry!”

  “Treason?” Tayte repeated. “What do you mean?” He needed more to go on. He needed his friend. “Marcus?”

  Tayte shook him but he knew he hadn’t felt it. The pressure on Tayte’s arm had left him as suddenly as it arrived, and in that moment he knew his friend was gone.

  Chapter Two

  Detective Inspector Jack Fable worked for the Metropolitan Police Service at New Scotland Yard. His real name was William Russell Fable, but he’d been called Jack for so long now because of his middle name that it eventually stuck. “A terrier with a bone,” someone had once said, and he still was. He had no idea who William Fable was any more. He thought his parents would have liked that other guy better, but it was too late for that now.

  Fable was fifty-six years old, had passed up early retirement a year ago and would do so again if he made sixty. He figured either the job or the cigarettes would eventually kill him, but he’d be damned if he was going to depart this world through the slow decay of boredom. He’d been a DI for as long as he could remember. Maybe twenty years - he wasn’t counting. He had no ambition beyond his current grade because he liked to get things done and it was plain to him that the higher up the ladder you climbed, the more bureaucratic bullshit you had to deal with.

  He was an iron-faced man with neat, mid-brown hair that was thin on top and combed to one side with a fixing product of some kind. It wasn’t quite a comb-over. Not yet. He shaved twice a day and didn’t feel that people in authority should dress down for the job. He liked suits, always black and with the tie to match. If he was old school then he was a dying breed, and more was the pity to his mind.

  Fable hated being at his office almost as much as he hated being home at his one-bed flat in Blackfriars, but both were necessary evils. His office, like his flat, was little more than a shell, with plain cream walls and a blue-grey carpet that struggled to find any kind of cohesion with the rest of the environment. There were no ornaments, no photographs. Just a teak-effect desk with the standard issue metal wastepaper basket, a few chairs and a coat stand.

  He was sitting at his desk looking down on two familiar scene-of-crime photographs: a double homicide in Bermondsey, which after three months was beginning to go cold. He held them between nicotine-stained fingers and stared at them like he was waiting for something to change - something that might give him a new angle beyond the limited forensic evidence they had.

  One photograph showed a man in a white, bloodstained dressing gown, slouched back on a leather armchair. The blood was concentrated in the middle of his chest where two bullets had ended his life. The other image was of the dead man’s wife, lying in a pool of designer shopping bags in the entrance hallway. She’d been shot once in the head - 9mm, point blank - and it was some small grace that she probably hadn’t felt a thing. He put her death down to bad timing, plain and simple. If she’d tried on one more pair of Christian Louboutins they probably would have saved her life.

  Fable laughed sourly to himself. “The evil that men do,” he said with a rasping, barrow-boy accent: the product of a tough East London childhood and too many cigarettes.

  He studied the woman’s image for a long time. She made him think about his own marriage, which was something he’d tried once a long time ago. He’d always known it wouldn’t work for him. He gave the phrase ‘married to the job’ a whole new definition. He shook his head, thinking it a mercy that the kids weren’t home as he turned back to the photograph of the man who had once been Julian Davenport. He’d been the target - no doubt about it.

  The Scenes of Crime Officers had lifted plenty of prints from the apartment, but they hadn’t found a single one that led anywhere. It seemed like a cold-blooded assassination and as things stood there was still so little to go on. With no prior offences, Davenport was as clean as his apartment and as far as Fable knew, the man had no enemies. There was no sign of a struggle, which was telling, and no known motive. The only thing that kept Fable going on this case was that he supposed the killer had to be known to his victim. They often were. He just had to find the connection.

  “Jack? You got a minute?”

  It was the chief and he was gone again before Fable had a chance to look up. He always kept his door open when he was at his desk; he didn’t like to be shut in. He sighed and reluctantly slipped the photographs back into his desk drawer. He’d never known a murder case he didn’t take personally. He just couldn’t stomach the idea that some low-life out there thought they were smarter than he was - thought they could do whatever they damn well pleased and get away with it. He’d made it his business to prove such people wrong and sooner or later he usually did. He supposed that was why the Bermondsey case was getting to him.

  The chief, or Graham Tanner as he was called in the regular world, was someone with whom Fable had had too many run-ins over the two years since he’d made the rank. So many that they largely left each other alone these days because neither wanted the grief any more. That suited Fable just fine. He supposed Tanner saw him as some kind of threat, but that was his issue. He wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. In the greater scheme of things people like DCI Graham Tanner came and went like seasonal flu.

  Fable’s desk phone rang and he picked it up. The voice at the other end told him there had been a shooting near Covent Garden. He was to go to Maiden Lane and take over the investigation.

  Chapter Three

  The witness interviews took place in the upstairs function rooms at Rules restaurant. The place had been closed and Maiden Lane was shut off while the SOCO team went about their work. Talking to DI Fable and going over everything that had happened had been as useful to Tayte as he hoped it had been to the police. The golden hour worked both ways. It had forced him to focus. Now, as he left the restaurant for the second time that afternoon, he had a number of questions neatly ordered in his mind, all of which boiled down to who wanted Marcus Brown dead and why? Finding the answers wasn’t going to be easy, he knew that, but he wasn’t going home until he had.

  The crime scene was still busy outside as he walked the street under escort. It had stopped
raining, although the air was still damp and cool. He passed several spotlights on stands and people in blue, paper-like over-suits. He wasn’t really taking much in, unable to look anywhere near the spot where his friend had been gunned down two hours earlier. He saw Jean waiting for him beyond the galvanised barrier on the busy corner of Maiden Lane and Bedford Street and thought she couldn’t have been there long. They had been told that someone would take them home, or to the hotel in Tayte’s case, after the interviews were finished. Tayte thanked the uniformed constable who let him through the barrier and he gave Jean a pensive smile.

  “The car won’t be long,” Jean said over the din of city traffic that was in constant flow to and from a nearby junction with The Strand.

  Tayte nodded. “Great,” he said. “I’d like to get out of these clothes.”

  The blood on his shirt and trousers had dried to a dark crust. He’d lost track of his jacket and didn’t care to have it back. He checked the time on his 1980s retro digital watch and the glowing red LED digits told him it was almost five p.m.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  There had been little time to talk about what had happened before now and when they did have the chance early on the inclination hadn’t been there.

  “I keep hearing his voice,” Jean said.

  “Marcus?”

  “The gunman.”

  “He spoke to you?”

  Jean nodded. “He pointed that gun in my face and told me I’d brought it all on myself. That I shouldn’t have got involved. I don’t know what he thought I knew, but I was sure he was going to kill me, too.”

  That worried Tayte. Whoever had killed Marcus clearly thought the two of them were working together.

  “Did you tell the police?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did they offer you any kind of protection?”

  Jean shook her head. “They gave me a card with a number to call if I was concerned about anything.”

  That worried Tayte even more. “Same here,” he said. “In case I recall anything else that might be important.”