The Last Queen of England (24 page)

“In here,” Cornell said.

There were several doorways.
 
The one they took led down several iron steps into a room that was lit by high glassless windows.
 
As Tayte descended, he began to wonder if he would ever make it out again.
 
It was clear that Cornell planned to kill them and he thought he would do it just as soon as they reached wherever they were going with the body and were of no further use to him.

“Drop him there,” Cornell said.
 
“In the corner.”

That’s where Tayte thought it would happen.
 
He kept his eyes on Jean’s the whole time, willing her to understand what was in his mind.
 
He wasn’t just going to stand there and let this man shoot them.
 
Now that Marcus Brown was gone he knew there was no one left in his life to mourn his own death, but there were still things he needed to do: important things like finding out who he was.
 
He just kept thinking that there were two of them and one of him.
 
That had to give them a chance.

They reached the corner in shadow and gently lowered the body to the ground.
 
As Tayte rose again his only thought was to charge Cornell, but at that moment Cornell said something that stopped him.

“Now pick up your girlfriend.”

That confused Tayte.
 
“What?”

Cornell came closer but kept his distance with the gun.
 
“Pick her up.
 
I want you to carry her out.”

“Oh, I get it,” Tayte said.
 
“Busy hands, right?”

“You’re catching on.”

Tayte wasn’t sure he had enough strength left to carry a bag of groceries let alone another person, but after the taxi driver Jean felt light in his arms.
 
As they left the room and headed back outside, Tayte wondered why Cornell had passed up such an easy opportunity to kill them.
 
Clearly he had something else in mind and that worried him.

They crossed the barren yard outside, passed a grey portacabin and the main gate with the black cab beyond.
 
There was a brick outbuilding with a tall chimney ahead of them and they made straight for it.

“What do you plan to do with us?” Tayte asked as they reached it.

Cornell gave no reply.
 
He paced ahead and opened the door, flicked his gun and ushered them inside.

“You can’t walk away from this, Cornell,” Tayte said as he crossed the threshold and was met by a gust of warm air.
 
Flies buzzed in his face.
 
“The police know who you are now.
 
It’s over.”

“I never planned to walk away,” Cornell said.
 
“And you’re wrong.
 
It’s not over.
 
It’s only just beginning.”

At that point Jean screamed in Tayte’s ear.
 
He almost dropped her as he spun her around and lowered her to the ground.
 
In the corner of the room opposite the entrance was a thin, elderly man who seemed to be crouching amongst the pipework and the rubble.
 
He was painted red with what Tayte supposed was his own blood and his face seemed locked in a perpetual scream.
 
It looked like some macabre waxworks diorama and the sight of it made Tayte retch.
 
He turned to Cornell.

“You sick -” he began, but the butt of Cornell’s gun silenced him instantly as it smashed into his temple.
 
Then he was falling and the world was suddenly black.

Standing outside Robert Cornell’s front door for the second time that day, DI Jack Fable recalled the time when he didn’t have to stop to consider if what he was doing as a police officer was lawful.
 
PACE had seen to that - the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.
 
Passed in 1984, it legislated against the arbitrary searching of property or persons without just cause.
 
It protected a person’s civil rights.
 
Fable understood the need for legislation, but to his old-school mind it was just more bureaucracy to wade through.
 
It had done nothing but slow the pace of an investigation as far as he was concerned.

Fable had a gut feeling and now it was his turn to run with it.
 
The notion that Robert Cornell was the man he was looking for made perfect sense to him.
 
Killers are often known to their victims if only by association, which in this case was
Quo Veritas
.
 
And on this occasion, together with seeing Jean’s motorcycle where no right-minded person would leave a vehicle for any length of time, it gave him all the ‘just cause’ he felt he needed to enter and search the property.
 
He gave the word and a firearms officer smashed the lock through with a steel battering ram.
 
Two more officers ran in through the doorway, weapons drawn.

“Armed police!” one of the men called.

The other officer dropped the ram and followed them while Fable and two other regular uniforms waited outside for the all clear.

There was no one home.
 
Fable hadn’t really expected anyone to be but firearms officers were a necessary precaution.
 
They cleared out and the regular officers moved in to begin a search of the property, looking for anything that might incriminate Robert Cornell.
 
If they found any corroborating evidence to support the notion that he was the man they were looking for, Fable would call in SOCO for a top-to-toe search, but he needed the evidence first.

He went into the lounge looking for photographs.
 
They told him a lot about a person: if they were married, whether they had any children, where they liked to spend their holidays and if they were close to anyone.
 
And it was about the photographs he didn’t see.

He saw a group of three frames on a low table by the front window.
 
They told him that Robert Cornell was a military man like his late father and his younger brother.
 
One showed a tank of some kind beneath a blue sky, with two young boys sitting up on the barrel.
 
They were saluting while their father stood beside it in full dress uniform.
 
Something about it made Fable think of the Gulf War - the pale camouflage.
 
Another photograph showed the two boys in their own uniforms, twenty-something years old, smart and proud and fresh-faced.

Fable thought the third image an odd subject for a coffee table.
 
It showed a military funeral in mid procession, Union Jack flag draped across the coffin.
 
The two boys were at the forefront, older still with their heads slightly bowed.
 
What he didn’t see by way of photographs told him that Robert Cornell was single or divorced and that he had no children - or none that he cared about enough to put them alongside his father and brother.

He put the photographs back and began to pace the room, taking everything in as he wondered how much longer the background checks on Cornell would take.
 
It had been twenty minutes so far and he figured it wouldn’t be much longer.
 
Then he would have a better picture of the man.
 
His military record might provide some telling information and he would find out where he worked now.
 
He already knew from the waitress at the café that he was wearing a security guard uniform.
 
There would be a useful lead somewhere in the data: something or someone to tell him where Cornell was or where he would eventually go.

One of the uniformed officers came into the room.
 
“Better take a look at this, sir.”

Fable followed him upstairs.
 
In what was the only room in the house that was made up as a bedroom they had found a box of ammunition.
 
9mm.
 
A common bullet, Fable knew, but he also knew that it was extremely uncommon for any law-abiding citizen to keep a gun in their bedside drawer.
 
It was the same calibre bullet that had killed Julian Davenport and Marcus Brown - the same calibre bullet that had been stopped by Jefferson Tayte’s briefcase.

Fable ended the search there.
 
He’d seen enough to warrant calling forensics in before too much else was disturbed.
 
What he really wanted was the gun to go with the bullets so they could match the casings to the murder weapon, but maybe they would find something else that tied Robert Cornell to one of the victims - a fibre perhaps or a trace of blood on an item of clothing.

As he went to make the call, Fable was even more convinced that Cornell was the man he was looking for and he hoped he was right.
 
He needed progress.
 
But if Cornell was his man, the absence of a gun in the drawer with the bullets only served to nurture his concern for the safety of the genealogist who had found him and for the historian who was now with them.

With them...

It occurred to Fable then that although Tayte no longer had a mobile phone there was a good chance Jean Summer did.
 
It hadn’t been long since he’d seen Jean’s motorcycle outside the café but he shook his head at himself just the same for not thinking to call her sooner.
 
He had her number.
 
Even if she didn’t answer, triangulating a mobile phone’s location via the cellular network was common practice.
 
If Jean’s phone was switched on it wouldn’t take long to identify her general location.
 
Fable made the call knowing it was the best hope he could give them for now.

Chapter Fifteen

W
hen Jefferson Tayte opened his eyes again following the blow Robert Cornell had dealt him, he saw the man by a high recess in the wall to his right.
 
He was standing in front of a tall, open fireplace.
 
There was ash on the ground and bright embers were glowing in the makeshift fire-basket that seemed to Tayte like old iron railings that had been thrown down over the rubble to suspend the coal.
 
He watched Cornell take a bag from a pile to his right and throw it in.

A dull and repetitive throb on the side of Tayte’s head reminded him why he’d blacked out.
 
As he regained his senses and smelled the dust and the metallic tang of blood in the air, he saw that he was sitting against a wall with his legs out in front of him.
 
His arms were secured behind his back and his ankles were bound with something he couldn’t see.
 
His initial instinct was to get up but a small voice stopped him.

“It’s no use.”
 
It was Jean, speaking in a whisper.
 
“He made me put nylon cable ties around your wrists and ankles.
 
There’s another one looped around the pipe.”

She was sitting next to him, bound in the same fashion with her hands behind her, secured to a length of four-inch steel pipe that was bolted at intervals to the concrete floor.

“You okay?” Tayte asked, immediately seeing that for the dumb question it was.
 
Of course she wasn’t okay.

Jean gave no reply.

Several feet beyond her, Tayte saw that the door was still open, pouring light onto the man crouching in the corner opposite: a man whom Tayte now realised had to be the recently abducted Peter Harper.
 
He seemed to stare at them, but Tayte figured him for a dead man now that he could see him more clearly.
 
His body was slumped rather than crouched, supported by the walls, and Tayte supposed he must have lost more blood than it was possible to survive.

Despite Jean having told him it was no use trying to struggle free, Tayte pulled and twisted at the cable-ties anyway.
 
His movement drew Cornell’s attention and the man turned slowly away from the fire, which had already begun to spit and flame through the column of smoke that was rising into the chimney.

“Mr Tayte,” Cornell said.
 
“I’m glad you’re back.”
 
He came over and squatted beside him.
 
“I was beginning to think you were dead already.”
 
He leant closer.
 
“Can’t have that, can we?
 
Not yet.”

Tayte stared the man down and got straight to the point.
 
He wanted answers.
 
“How did you find Harper and the rest?
 
Anything to do with
Quo Veritas
?
 
Did they have a members’ list or something?”

Cornell laughed at the suggestion.
 
“You found them easily enough, didn’t you?
 
You found me.”

Yeah,
Tayte thought.
 
And look where that got me.
 
He looked over at Peter Harper again, unable to stop himself out of morbid curiosity.
 
“You like inflicting pain on people, don’t you?
 
I guess a man like you must get a kick out of it.
 
Is that it?”