Chapter Eighteen
They stopped off at Jean’s flat to pick up a change of clothes and when they arrived back at the hotel Tayte felt like a weary traveller returning home to the familiar and the ordinary after a journey that was anything but. Time seemed to run on a different clock at the hotel and he felt it the moment he stepped over the threshold - the freneticism of the last twenty-four hours having been checked at the door like a heavy coat he was glad to be rid of.
As he crossed the polished marble floor in the lobby, heading for the Churchill Bar with Jean beside him, he was already thinking about his old roommate, Jack Daniels, wondering how much of his company he could afford to indulge in before his head became too foggy to concentrate. He knew it was a fine line, but after their ordeal with Robert Cornell he intended to test it.
“According to Wikipedia,” Jean said as she browsed the Web on the BlackBerry Fable had loaned them, “the Ouroboros often represents self-reflexivity or cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly recreating itself. Cycles that begin again as soon as they end.”
“Like one monarch dying to be replaced by another,” Tayte said. “The king is dead - long live the king.”
“Or queen in this case.”
“Right,” Tayte said. “The Ouroboros circling the fleur-de-lis. Queen Anne recreated through her heir.”
“Yes, although in a broader sense it’s about the continuation of the Protestant Stuart bloodline.”
They reached the bar and the bright, neutral decor gave way to low lighting and rich mahogany panelling, lending an air of relaxation to the otherwise lively environment. The room hummed with abstract conversation from the clusters of people at the tables and at the bar, which Tayte made straight for.
“But why did Harper want to draw our attention to the Ouroboros?” he said, continuing the conversation. “As a part of the society’s emblem it makes perfect sense. It compounds the theory that this is about an heir - the royal bloodline recreated - but Harper must have heard me ask Cornell about that. He knew we’d already worked that much out, so what else was he trying to say?”
“I don’t know,” Jean said. “But whatever it was it’ll have to wait. Look over there.”
She didn’t point. She just nodded towards the far end of the bar where Michel Levant was sitting and smiling at them in his tight-lipped, effeminate manner. Tayte saw him raise a half-full champagne flute to acknowledge that he’d seen them, his golden Sun King ring catching the light as if to wink at them. Tayte was about to turn around again and leave when he was distracted.
“Good evening, sir. Madam. What can I get you?”
Tayte didn’t answer the barman right away. He was too caught up with the internal debate of whether or not to grab Jean’s hand and run.
“Sir?”
“Sorry,” Tayte said, refocusing. “I’ll take a JD on the rocks. Make it a double.” He wanted that drink and it was too late to run now. He turned to Jean, having forgotten his manners on account of the Frenchman who was almost upon them.
“Sounds good to me,” Jean said. “Make that two.”
Just hearing Levant’s thin, melodious voice again as he approached them made Tayte’s skin crawl.
“But where have you been?” Levant said as he came between them, reeking of some well-matched sickly-sweet cologne that was so strong Tayte had to step away. He was wearing black jeans and an embossed white shirt that had exuberant, jack-a-dandy flounces at the neck and cuffs. “S’il vous plaît!” he exclaimed. “Let me pay for your drinks. I insist.”
At that point Jean surprised Tayte by stealing his response before he had time to unleash it.
“I think you’ve done too much for us already today, Monsieur,” she said, her expression neutral.
Tayte wouldn’t have been so polite but the message was there just the same. He supposed something he’d said at the Italian restaurant must have struck a chord with Jean and it was good to see.
The corners of Levant’s mouth twitched. “Ah, to hear my native tongue spoken by one so charming,” he said. “You spoil me, Madame.”
A part of Tayte wanted to spoil Levant’s pointy little nose for having turned up uninvited, knowing that he must have followed them there at some point, too, but it was the part of Tayte that only existed in his alter ego fantasies. In case there was some chance Levant didn’t already know his room number, rather than give it to the barman and be overheard, he went for his wallet to pay for the drinks, but Levant was ahead of him. Tayte missed his lithe arm as he slipped the barman the money.
“I really do insist,” Levant said.
Tayte just frowned and put his wallet away again.
Levant indicated a vacant table further into the bar. “Shall we?” he said, heading towards it, allowing no time for debate.
Tayte eyed Jean as they followed Levant a few paces back, his expression asking what the hell they were going to do. He didn’t want to sit down and shoot the breeze with this man. He was getting cranky-tired and they had a serious puzzle to work out.
“Just go with it,” Jean whispered. “If he is involved, I’d sooner keep him close for now. Maybe he’ll slip up somewhere.”
Tayte doubted that. “Well don’t tell him anything.”
Levant reached the table and turned back, still wearing that honeyed smile as they arrived with their drinks and sat down. Tayte figured he’d knock his drink back, encourage Jean to do the same and then say something about it having been a long day. He thought that’s what he would do but Jean jumped straight into conversation.
“My son’s missing, Mr Levant. Do you know anything about that?”
Levant looked mortified, his expression overly exaggerated like a bad actor trying too hard to get the emotion across. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “But why would I?”
“Maybe you wouldn’t,” Jean said. “But I had to ask.” She locked eyes with him. “Elliot is all I have. There are things I need to make up for and I need him back. We’re not close like a mother and child should be and I have to correct that. Do you understand?”
Levant fidgeted. The penetrating eye contact was clearly making him feel uncomfortable. “But of course,” he said. “And I’m sure you will. You must never give up hope.”
Jean gave a short, sardonic laugh. “I won’t, believe me. I’ll dedicate my life to finding my son and when I do, whoever took him from me will wish they hadn’t. I’ll hunt them to the end of my days.”
Levant smiled and squirmed in his seat. “I believe you,” he said. “I see it in your eyes. Redoubtable!”
Jean sat back, not quite relaxing. She was still studying the Frenchman as though trying to get the measure of him, to understand whether her obvious appeal had hit the right target. “Were you waiting long at the bar?” she asked, changing the subject.
“An hour. No more.”
“Why?” Tayte said, joining the conversation against his better judgement.
“I will not lie to you,” Levant said, turning to Tayte. “I am, as you say, an heir hunter. And you are on a royal heir hunt, no?”
As soon as Tayte opened his mouth to reply, Levant waved a limp hand at him and tutted. “Please, do not try to deny it. I already know as much.”
“How?” Tayte asked. Keeping his words deliberately short, his tone curt.
Levant pursed his lips. “I overheard you at the construction site. I was outside when you asked your questions. The windows were broken. The sound carried.”
Of course, Tayte thought, trying to recall what else he’d said. Levant had been there the whole time and Tayte figured he must have overheard everything.
Levant’s eyes lit up. “Queen Anne’s heir,” he said. “I knew it had to be something big but I never would have guessed it.”
“It’s just a theory,” Jean said.
“Perhaps so, but a good place to start, no? We can find the truth from there.”
“Quo Veritas,” Jean said under her breath.
“Excusez-moi?”
“Nothing,” Tayte said. He put his glass down with a thud. “Look, Levant. What you did today - whatever your motives - we’re grateful to you but it doesn’t make us buddies. There is no ‘we’ as far as you’re concerned. I told you the other day that I wasn’t interested in teaming up with you and that still stands.”
Levant dismissed Tayte’s words with a pinched smile. “But if you do not need Michel Levant’s help, I can only assume you have already worked it out. Is that it?”
“Worked what out?”
“The ahnentafel, of course. The construct that will point the way to the heir.”
Christ, Tayte thought.
“I heard you mention that, too,” Levant said. “But I thought all was lost to the flames. How did you find it?”
It was Tayte’s turn to fidget in his seat. “As Jean said - it’s all just a theory.”
“But you do have the ahnentafel?”
“Whether we do or not,” Tayte said. “The only people who can confirm whether there’s so much as a grain of truth to any of this are dead.”
“Ah yes,” Levant said. “Peter Harper. I gather he did not survive his ordeal?”
“He died less than an hour ago,” Jean said.
“But that is too bad. I wish I had found the courage to act sooner. Maybe then I could have saved his life, too.”
It was clear that Levant wasn’t going to let them forget what he’d done for them, but it wasn’t cutting any ice with Tayte, who thought it equally clear that Levant wasn’t getting the message he was trying, perhaps too subtly, to send him.
The Frenchman persisted. “Did Mr Harper say anything before he died?”
Tayte knocked his drink back and stood up, scraping his chair legs over the wood flooring. “Yeah, Levant, he did. Know what he said? He said ‘get lost’. Come on Jean, I’ve had about as much of this as I can take.”
They rode the lift to their rooms. Tayte hit the button and leant back against the rail while they waited for the doors to close. When they did he turned to Jean who was plucking at her hair, frowning at her image in the dark glass. However bad she felt she looked, next to him he thought she looked great.
“Can I take it your opinion of Levant has cooled off somewhat this evening?”
Jean stopped fussing with her hair and turned to him. “Ice cold,” she said. “I told you he’d slip up.”
“He did? How?”
“I didn’t realise when I saw him at the bar, but later on when you asked him why he was there, you hit the nail on the head.”
“I did?”
Jean nodded. “I believe he slipped up just by being there. When Cornell died he took the ahnentafel with him. The heirlooms had already been destroyed and Levant would have known as much given that he was paying such close attention to what was going on. It was over. In which case, why is Levant still following us?”
The lift doors opened to a musical ping, like the sound of the penny as it dropped.
“Because he already knew it wasn’t over,” Tayte said. “And how could he unless he already knew we had the ahnentafel by other means.”
They stepped out of the lift and headed along the hallway.
“Right,” Jean said. “And we got the ahnentafel from the text messages on Cornell’s phone, didn’t we?”
“Levant asked me if Cornell had one.”
“Exactly,” Jean said. “He led you right to it. Like he wanted to make sure you found it and handed it to the police.”
Tayte had to admit that it stacked up. Perhaps Levant really had played them. Now he was trying to use them like Tayte now supposed he might have used Robert Cornell.
“But why?” he said, thinking aloud.
“I get the feeling that Mr Levant doesn’t like to get his own hands dirty,” Jean said.
Tayte agreed. “Maybe he wants us to think we found the ahnentafel for ourselves so we’ll go on and work it out for him. Then he somehow means to come along and steal the prize. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d wanted Robert Cornell dead all along. He’d become a liability, hadn’t he? When the last piece of the ahnentafel was sent this morning Levant had no further use for him, so he took him out of the game.”
“Only, I did that for him,” Jean said as they approached their rooms.
“And Levant comes across as the hero.” The idea left a bad taste in Tayte’s mouth.
“What about the other phone?” Jean said. “If we’re right, what was it doing at the brother’s house?”
“I don’t know. Do you think Fable would buy any of this?”
Jean cringed. “Not tonight, he won’t. We still can’t prove anything, can we?”
“No, we can’t,” Tayte said, wondering just how smart this Machiavellian Frenchman was and whether he would prove too smart to leave any proof of his involvement behind at all.
Tayte fished inside his wallet for his key card. “I could use a shower before we start on the ahnentafel. Might wake me up some. You wanna freshen up and meet back in my room in ten?”
“Sounds good,” Jean said. “Just don’t fall asleep waiting for me if I take a little longer. She opened her door. “Get the coffee on. I’ll be as quick as I can.”
Coffee, Tayte thought. That was the sensible choice. “I hear that,” he said as he went inside.
Chapter Nineteen
Tayte’s hotel room looked directly out onto Portman Square: a small parkland oasis in the middle of a busy circulatory system. Because of the late hour and the trees, his window was black. There were no city lights visible, just more of his tired-looking reflection gazing back at him. He drew the curtains, eyeing the crisp, white bed linen as he passed the bed, thinking how good it would be to crawl in there for a few days, maybe a week, watch TV and live on room service. He thought he might do that when this was over.
Jean took closer to twenty minutes to freshen up, by which time Tayte had shaved and showered and set up the coffee machine that was now dripping through nicely. They were both wearing their courtesy dressing gowns, hair still damp, faces shining, and there was something about Jean coming to his room like that that felt naughty to Tayte. It was almost midnight and there they were in his hotel room, a cord’s tug from a close encounter, about to share a jug of coffee and who knows what else. He chuckled to himself as he poured their drinks. Who was he kidding?
“Mmm, coffee smells good,” Jean said. “I was thinking if we went over what we already know something might come from that.”
“Right,” Tayte said. “The ahnentafel.” His mind was suddenly back on track, wondering how they were going to identify whose family tree the ahnentafel belonged to and who the subject was.
They sat at the desk in a corner of the room and Tayte began by writing the ahnentafel out on the hotel notepad. He tore the sheet off and put it to one side. Then he popped open a fresh bag of Hershey’s miniatures for the long night ahead and started with his favourite, Mr Goodbar. He thought the protein from the peanuts might help him think.
“So,” he said, drawing the word out. “Where do we start?”
“Let’s start with the Royal Society.”
“Okay.”
Tayte tore off five more sheets of paper and onto each he wrote the names of the hanged Royal Society Fellows.
“We’re supposing these men uncovered a royal conspiracy,” he said, thinking about Jean’s history student friends. “That for political reasons the Whigs wanted to ensure the end of the Tory-supporting House of Stuart in favour of the Hanovers. Did I get that right?”
“That’s it,” Jean said. “And it’s substantiated by Dr Hutton’s research into the take-up of certain chemicals or drugs by the bloodstream, and by the Reverend Naismith’s statistical studies into infant mortality.”
“Right,” Tayte said. “So they concluded that something was very wrong in the Royal House of Stuart. Potential heirs were dying left, right and centre. On what date were Queen Anne’s first and last children born?”
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�Now you’re asking,” Jean said. She turned to the BlackBerry. “The last was around 1700.” She tapped at the small keyboard then flicked her thumb over the scroller. “Here we are. The first was on the 12th of May, 1684. The last was on the 25th of January, 1700, when she gave birth to a stillborn daughter.”
“And she made no further attempt to have a child after that?”
“No. None during the twelve years of her reign.”
“Okay then,” Tayte said. “If there was an heir, they had to be born between those dates. So how did they pull it off?”
“Dr Hutton,” Jean said. “Rakesh Dattani told us he was Anne’s physician for a time. He could have switched babies.”
“Of course,” Tayte said. “A stillborn child in place of the royal heir. When did Dattani say Hutton served Anne? I’m lost without my notebook.”
“During the five years leading up to her coronation,” Jean said. “So that would have been between 1697 and 1702.”
“Good. That narrows it down.” Tayte indicated the BlackBerry. “That thing tell you the dates of Anne’s failed pregnancies between those years?”
Jean’s thumb started scrolling again. “There were four. A stillborn daughter on the 25th of March 1697. A miscarriage in December that same year. A son called Charles, who died the day he was born - that was on the 15th of December 1698 - and the last attempt I just mentioned on the 25th of January, 1700.”
Tayte tore off another sheet of paper and wrote the dates down. “If it was Hutton’s plan to safeguard the Protestant Stuart bloodline, I think we can safely assume that the heir was born on one of those dates. Discounting the miscarriage gives us a choice of three. The substitute child had to come from another family that Dr Hutton was attending on one of those dates.” He thought about the ahnentafel again. “The big question is, whose family was it?”
“Do you think the mother knew?”
Tayte shrugged. “I don’t know. It would have been safer if she didn’t, and how could any mother consciously agree to such a proposal. I suspect only the five Royal Society Fellows knew the identity of the heir so let’s look at them again. Naismith, among other things, was also a genealogist. We can take it then that the ahnentafel is his work, created to identify the heir when the time was right. And for that we turn to William Daws.”
The Last Queen of England: A Genealogical Crime Mystery #3 (Jefferson Tayte) Page 19