The Last Queen of England (33 page)

All threats...

Fable had a badge and a signature on a piece of paper to ensure his silence - to protect him, he hoped - but what did Tayte and Summer have?

“Not a damn thing,” he mused.

If they found what they were looking for - what he had asked them to look for - his cynical side couldn’t discount the idea that Jean would go missing like her son and Jefferson Tayte would be repatriated in a metal casket.

In Tayte’s hotel room, he and Jean sat and drank coffee and threw ideas around for the best part of an hour, getting nowhere.
 
Tayte eventually stood up and began to pace the room, scrunching his toes into the carpet, talking as he walked.

“It doesn’t really help that we know the possible dates on which the subject of the ahnentafel was born unless we know whose family tree it belongs to.
 
What about the Ouroboros?
 
Let’s look at that again.”

Jean took off her glasses and pinched her eyes.
 
“We keep looking at it,” she said.
 
“I’m becoming an authority but it’s not helping.”

“It has to be the key,” Tayte said.
 
“Harper would have known we’d need one.
 
We just need to work out how to apply it to the ahnentafel.”

Jean sighed and went back to the BlackBerry.
 
She started reading out much of what she’d already said, constantly flicking her thumb over the scroller.
 
When she went quiet, Tayte returned to his chair and began to think aloud.

“Look at it logically,” he told himself.
 
“It’s an ahnentafel.
 
A genealogist put it together soon after 1700.
 
You’re a genealogist, JT.
 
Think like one.
 
It’s family history.
 
The past.
 
It had to exist in his lifetime.”

The room fell quiet again - just the sound of Jean working the BlackBerry.

“It goes back twenty-three generations from the subject,” Tayte said, not to himself this time but to Jean.
 
He sounded brighter.

“Do you have something?”

“I think I do.
 
You see, even with today’s technology and all the improvements in record keeping over the years, I’d find it next to impossible to trace just any old family history through twenty-three generations.
 
We’re talking several hundred years.
 
Back then, unless the family history had been meticulously recorded through the centuries, Naismith couldn’t have compiled such an ahnentafel.”

“So it has to be a famous family history?”

Tayte’s face split into a cheesy grin.
 
“How about the Royal Family itself?
 
That’s where I was going wrong before.
 
The chicken and egg scenario.
 
I was thinking that to find the heir, we first had to work out their family tree.
 
But that’s precisely what we needed in order to find the heir.
 
Like the Ouroboros, it comes back to itself and that’s the thing.”
 
Tayte rocked back on his chair, the satisfaction of discovery flushing his cheeks.
 
“This puzzle starts where it ends.”

“It self-references?” Jean said.

“Exactly.
 
To find Queen Anne’s heir we have to start with the heir as though the child had lived.
 
Which is exactly what your royal conspiracy theory proposes.
 
The ahnentafel is only part of the puzzle.
 
If we follow it, it should lead us to the real heir and the family they became a part of when the babies were switched.
 
We can confirm it easily enough.”

Tayte found the sheet of paper onto which he’d written the ahnentafel.
 
“So the first digit represents Queen Anne’s supposed stillborn child or her heir if we’re right.
 
The second digit, also a number one in this case, represents Queen Anne.
 
A zero takes the male line.”

Jean pointed to the next digit along.
 
It was a zero.
 
“So that’s Queen Anne’s father, James II, and the next is a zero, so that’s
his
father, Charles I.”

“You’ve got it,” Tayte said.
 
“Think you can keep going?
 
“It’s the last person on the ahnentafel we’re interested in.
 
Something about them should give us our next direction.”

Jean took a deep breath.
 
“I’ll try.”

She grabbed a pen and pulled the ahnentafel towards her so she could write the names in.
 
Then she rattled through nine of the twenty-three generations - the ahnentafel following the kings and queens that were so familiar to her - before arriving at James I of Scotland, where the ahnentafel steered away from the well known monarchs through James’s wife, whom she knew to be Joan Beaufort.

“Thank God for the Internet,” she said, turning to the BlackBerry again to follow the less familiar line.

It took her through three more generations before arriving back on familiar ground with Edward I and the House of Plantagenet.
 
Then to Henry III and to John Lackland, brother of Richard the Lionheart.
 
She continued in this way, using her knowledge and the Web for reference until all the names were written against their respective digits on the ahnentafel.
 
When she’d finished she set the pen down and sat back.

“So who does it point to?” Tayte asked, eager to hear the answer.

Jean turned the ahnentafel around so Tayte could read it.

“Ethelred II?” Tayte said.
 
“The Unready?”

“The very same.
 
Although, etymologists would tell you that the word ‘unready’ has taken on a different meaning over the years.
 
In Ethelred’s day it was ‘
unraed
’, which meant ‘without counsel’ or to have poor counsel.”

“Oh,” Tayte said, not really paying attention.
 
He was wondering where this discovery had left them and he thought that Naismith’s ahnentafel could have pointed to anyone in the British Royal Family tree, so why Ethelred II?
 
“What else do we know about him?”

“I can tell you the basics.
 
He reigned between 978 and 1016.
 
Became King at the age of about ten when his stepmother supposedly murdered his half-brother, who was later known as King Edward the Martyr.
 
He was an unpopular ruler.
 
Had a lot of trouble with Vikings and ordered the St Brice’s Day massacre to kill all the Danes in England.
 
He was defeated by the Danish Leader, Canute, at the Battle of Ashingdon in 1016 and was buried at St Paul’s.”

“Need to look anything up?” Tayte asked, smiling.

“I don’t think so,” Jean said.
 
“It’s hard to be specific when you don’t know what you’re looking for.”

Tayte was still smiling.
 
“I think we’ve found it.
 
You’re referring to St Paul’s Cathedral, right?”

“Not as it stands today, but yes.
 
There’s been a cathedral dedicated to St Paul on the same site since the beginning of the seventh century.
 
The present cathedral is the fifth generation, built after the previous building was destroyed by the Great Fire.”

“1666,” Tayte said.

“Designed by Royal Society Fellow, Sir Christopher Wren,” Jean added.

“I knew that.
 
Now you’ve spoiled it.”

“Spoiled what?”

“I wanted to say it - thought it might impress you.”

Jean threw the pen at him.
 
“I don’t want to get you too excited before bedtime,” she said, “but there’s a large statue of Queen Anne outside the West portico of St Paul’s.
 
The same St Paul’s that was being built during the time of our five Royal Society Fellows.”

Tayte arched his brow.
 
“What was it that Rakesh Dattani said of Sir Stephen Henley?
 
Probably trained under Christopher Wren at some point?”

“Words to that effect,” Jean said.

“St Paul’s it is then.
 
First thing in the morning.”

Chapter Twenty

T
he banging on his hotel room door woke him.
 
Jefferson Tayte got out of bed in his stars-and-stripes boxers, rubbed his gritty eyes as he slipped on his dressing gown and checked the time.
 
It was just after seven a.m. and the banging was getting louder.

“Just a minute!”

He checked the peephole and saw that it was Jean, also in her gown.
 
When he opened the door he could see that she’d been crying.

“What is it?
 
What’s wrong?

Jean stomped into the room and sat on the bed.
 
She had a folded slip of paper in her hand.

“I came straight round,” she said.
 
She sniffed, removed her glasses and wiped her eyes.
 
“I just found this under my door.”

She handed Tayte the slip of paper and he unfolded it as he sat beside her.
 
He read it aloud.

“Find the heir - find your son.”

“Someone must have put it there during the night,” Jean added.

The note reaffirmed Tayte’s belief that they had been set up for this all along.
 
He read the words again, knowing that the police would have no hope of tracing the source.
 
It wasn’t handwritten.
 
It was printed on a sheet of white A4 paper in a
Times New Roman
font - as common to any word processor today as
Courier
was in the days of the typewriter.

Jean took a deep breath, trying to control her emotions.
 
“Elliot hasn’t just gone off somewhere, has he?
 
Somewhere inside me I was hoping that was all it was.
 
But it’s not, is it?
 
They’ve got him.”

Tayte wondered who ‘they’ were and as usual he thought about Michel Levant.
 
He’d been at the hotel last night.
 
He had every opportunity to slip the note under Jean’s door.
 
Maybe he’d tried to work the ahnentafel out for himself but couldn’t.
 
Now he wanted them to do it for him.
 
Tayte knew he couldn’t rule out Joseph Cornell either given what they knew about him, and he certainly didn’t believe Cornell was equipped to solve the puzzle by himself.
 
He heaved a sigh, thinking that it didn’t matter who had Elliot just now.
 
What did matter was that they now had another very personal reason to find whoever or whatever the ahnentafel ultimately pointed to.

“At least now we know,” Tayte said.
 
“And this note must mean he’s okay.
 
They’re clearly offering a trade.”

Jean nodded and Tayte realised he’d been holding her hand the whole time.
 
He smiled and let it go again.
 
“Look, why don’t you finish getting ready,” he said.
 
“I’ll hit the shower.
 
We’ll skip breakfast.
 
First one out of their room can knock for the other.”

Within twenty minutes they were washed and dressed and pacing across the hotel lobby, heading outside to Jean’s motorbike.

“Can’t we take the subway?” Tayte said.

Jean slipped her leather jacket on as they walked.
 
“You’re not wimping out on me, are you?”

Tayte feigned a smile.
 
“Not at all.
 
It’s just -”
 
He held up his briefcase.
 
“I thought it would be easier, that’s all.”

“You can hold on to it like before.”

Tayte was more worried about how he was going to hold on to the bike.
 
“What about helmets?”

“They’re in the panniers.”

“Good,” Tayte said without conviction.
 
“Helmets are good.”

They reached the reception desk and out of the corner of his eye Tayte was aware of two men sitting in the lobby reading newspapers.
 
They were dressed in jeans and polo shirts: one in a green fleece jacket, the other in black leather.
 
They folded their papers, their eyes blatantly on Tayte and Jean as they passed.

“Mr Tayte?
 
Ms Summer?”

Tayte and Jean stopped walking.
 
As the men approached, the one wearing the fleece produced a wallet, which he opened to show his ID.

“We’re with the Security Service.
 
I’m Officer Jackson and this is Officer Stubbs.”