The Last Queen of England (3 page)

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 pre-arranged 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?”

Chapter Two

D
etective 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.