The Last Queen of England (31 page)

“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

T
ayte’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?”