The Last Queen of England: A Genealogical Crime Mystery #3 (Jefferson Tayte)

by Robinson, Steve

  A black Range Rover caught Tayte’s eye as it drew level with them and slowly mounted the kerb. It had blacked out windows and brand new plates and Tayte instinctively stood in front of Jean as the nearside rear door opened. A man he’d seen recently got out and stepped towards them.

  “Michel Levant,” the man announced.

  He grabbed Tayte’s hand before he had time to react and pumped it lightly but exuberantly. Tayte did little to return the gesture. It was the man Marcus had been talking to at the cocktail bar before they left the restaurant. Over the man’s shoulder Tayte caught the smooth sheen of a tanned thigh in the back seat of the car just before the door closed and the driver pulled away.

  “And you must be Jean Summer,” Levant said with a soft French accent, his voice thin and melodious. “Marcus has mentioned you.” He held out his hand and Jean ignored it. Then laughing it off he turned back to Tayte. “But he has never mentioned you. American?”

  Tayte nodded. That much must have been clear from the restaurant. He didn’t elaborate. He was a firm believer in trusting your instincts and everything about this man told him he was bad news.

  Levant’s smile faded. “I wanted to offer my condolences,” he said. “Marcus Brown was a great man. The best in his field. He will be greatly missed.”

  Tayte wasn’t in the mood for this. “Look, who are you and what do you want?”

  “I am Michel Levant,” the man said again, as if his name alone explained everything. He produced a silver calling card with all the flair of a close-up magician. “International probate genealogist,” he added, punctuating the words.

  Tayte read it. “So you’re an heir hunter? Same question. What do you want?”

  “I want to offer you my services,” Levant said, sounding wounded. “I believe that Marcus was on to something important and that he was killed for what he knew. He was, I am sure, as much a friend to me as he was to you.”

  Tayte doubted that.

  Jean stepped in. “What makes you think we’re interested in pursuing Marcus’s work?”

  Levant laughed to himself again: a small laugh through pursed lips that made his expression somewhat effeminate.

  He was beginning to annoy Tayte. “And what makes you think we’d need your help if we were?”

  Levant eyed him seriously. “It is simple. Intrigue and friendship will demand that you pursue his work - human nature will not let you rest without answers. And you need my help because I am the best at what I do.”

  Tayte met Levant’s eyes. “Not where I come from you’re not.”

  Levant might have hit two out of three right, but Tayte had mixed feelings when it came to dedicated probate investigators: people like Levant who made their money connecting heirs with their fortunes, sometimes taking as much as forty percent for themselves. The business was entirely unregulated. It had become a magnet for the unscrupulous and while Tayte knew many good people in the field, he had the feeling that this particular heir hunter was only talking to them now because he could smell a finder’s fee.

  The police car they had been waiting for arrived, temporarily slowing the southbound traffic.

  “Look, excuse us,” Tayte said. He took Jean’s hand and pushed past Levant. “We’re not interested.”

  “But wait, I don’t know your name.”

  “That suits me just fine,” Tayte called back as he and Jean got into the car.

  Chapter Four

  Tayte had arranged to meet Jean for a drink later that evening. They needed to talk about what had happened and Tayte needed to work out what he was going to do about it. Somewhere neutral was the idea, but Tayte received a call from Jean not long after the police had dropped him back at his hotel, inviting him to her place for dinner, which he accepted. He thought Marcus would have liked that.

  It was just after seven p.m. when he arrived and it was almost dark outside. He brought along a bottle of wine that he’d picked up near the hotel and a bag of Hershey’s chocolate miniatures from the supply he’d brought with him from home. Giving them to Jean made it all feel like a proper date, although that wasn’t his intention. They had Chinese take-away delivered and Tayte, scrubbed up in a fresh tan linen suit, sat in an old leather chair by the window with his briefcase beside him. He had no idea why he’d brought it along; it was just out of habit. Neither he nor Jean had much of an appetite so they decided to drink the wine first and save the meal for later.

  Jean’s flat was on the eleventh floor of a recently developed high-rise in the Docklands area, facing east along the River Thames. It was cosy, Tayte thought as he waited for Jean to return from the kitchen with the drinks. The kitchen doorway led off the sitting room and another went back out into a narrow hallway where he’d passed three further doors that he figured led to bedrooms and a bathroom.

  He sighed for the hundredth time in as many minutes and gazed around at all the books that were lined on shelves against the walls. Larger tomes were piled like occasional tables beside the seating, which was covered with colourful throws. He was thinking about Marcus’s wife, Emmy. He’d called her when he got back to the hotel but predictably she wasn’t home. The police had answered on his second call and he imagined her house had been overrun all afternoon. He supposed she would be at the hospital or maybe with family by now and he hoped someone was taking care of her. As close as he and Marcus had been, he couldn’t begin to imagine how Emmy was feeling right now. He’d go and see her before he flew home, although he had no idea now when that would be.

  A tinkle of glass announced Jean’s return with the wine. She pulled out a low table between the chairs, set the wine down and curled her legs up, facing Tayte. She’d changed into jeans and a pastel-blue jumper and she was wearing her glasses now - the makeup gone. Tayte thought the natural look suited her better.

  “Thanks,” he said as Jean handed him a glass. The wine was red. He took a sip. “Not bad.”

  “I don’t know much about wine, I’m afraid,” Jean said. She smiled. “It’s red, white or rosé. That’s my limit.”

  Just as long as it contained alcohol Tayte didn’t really care what colour it was or what it tasted like. “I noticed a couple of motorcycle helmets on my way through. You ride?”

  “It’s the only way to get around town.”

  Tayte had difficulty imagining Jean on a scooter. She didn’t seem the type, but what did he know? “And the other helmet? Your ex-husband’s?”

  Jean smiled at him as if she’d just been caught with her hand in the till. “My son’s,” she said. The baggage was out.

  “Does he live with you?” The question just came out. Tayte had no idea why he was acting so interested.

  “Off and on,” Jean said. “He prefers to stay with his dad.”

  Tayte nodded and gulped his wine. Small talk was definitely not his thing. He decided to change the subject, eager to go over the conversation at the restaurant earlier. He needed to know if Jean had any more insight into what Marcus had been working on and more than anything, he hoped it would take him closer to finding out why it appeared to have led to his murder.

  “Do you think you were close with any of those questions you asked Marcus at the restaurant?”

  “I don’t know,” Jean said, “I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon. He was keen to shut me up, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, he was, and I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon, too. Especially about what Marcus said just before he -” Tayte couldn’t continue without pausing first. “Before he died.”

  “Treason?”

  Tayte nodded. “You mentioned a Bonny Prince. Bonny Prince Charlie, the Jacobite?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And the two words fit together, don’t they? Jacobite and treason?”

  “Very much so,” Jean said. “But not in the twenty-first century. The Jacobite risings happened over two hundred and fifty years ago.”

  Tayte wished he had Marcus’s briefcase. While he hoped DI Fable and his team would turn
something up at the house, he knew how particular Marcus was with his paperwork. Whatever he was working on was likely to have been with him at Rules and his killer clearly knew how important it was.

  “And what about Queen Anne?” Tayte said. “You told me she’d been the hot topic with Marcus all month. How might she fit in?”

  Jean shook her head while she thought about it. “I really don’t know,” she said. “Anne succeeded William III in 1702 and reigned until 1714 when the Hanovers came to the throne. Since the Act of Union between England and Scotland was passed during Anne’s reign, she became the first monarch of Great Britain and the last queen of England. Further Jacobite risings happened soon after she died. One in 1715 and another in 1745. Marcus wasn’t so much interested in the Bonny Prince as with Jacobitism in general. It’s all basic history stuff.”

  Tayte considered what he knew about the Jacobite movement, most of which he’d gleaned from movies about Bonnie Prince Charlie and books by authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson. He quickly concluded that he didn’t know much at all and decided to let the professional bring him up to date.

  “How about a little history 101?” he said. “What was their beef?”

  Jean sipped her wine and settled back with the glass. “It began in 1688 with the Glorious Revolution, when Anne’s father, James II, fled England and thus abdicated from the throne. The situation was later aggravated by the 1701 Act of Settlement, passed under William III’s reign just before he died and Anne came to the throne. She and her sister Mary - although daughters of James II who was a devout catholic - were equally devout converts to the Church of England. The Act stipulated that only those of the Church of England faith were eligible for succession to the throne.”

  “And that placed the Hanovers next in line?”

  “That’s right. It ensured that in the event of Anne dying without issue - which she did - succession would fall to the Electress Sophia of Hanover, rather than to James II’s son, who was also called James and was later known as the Old Pretender. Anyway, Sophia died a few weeks before Anne, so the title fell to her son George, who in 1714 was crowned King George I. The Act still stands today.”

  Tayte scoffed. “I thought all your British kings and queens came to power by right of succession through the divinity of God, not man.”

  “And there’s your beef as you put it. The Jacobites essentially stood for what was arguably right - maintaining the line of kings through the direct Stuart bloodline and James II. When Anne died, being the last of the Stuart monarchs, the uprisings against the Hanovers gained momentum in an attempt to restore the bloodline.”

  “Because the Hanovers only came to power by virtue of their faith?”

  “More or less. You see, the Electress Sophia of Hanover was - now let me get this right. She was Queen Anne’s first cousin once removed, descended from the Stuart line through James I’s daughter, Elizabeth. George I was Anne’s second cousin and something like fiftieth in the line of succession.”

  “Fiftieth?”

  Jean nodded with enthusiasm. “It’s an unprecedented figure.”

  “And all because of the Act of Settlement?” Tayte said, letting Jean know that he was paying attention.

  “Precisely. You could argue that it changed all the rules, interfering with the intended line of kings to suit man’s purpose. Although the bloodline has survived, if to a lesser extent. The Windsor ancestry, or I should say the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha ancestry as it was before it was changed to something that sounded more British, still runs all the way back to Alfred the Great.”

  “But theirs is not the true, direct bloodline?”

  “Not if you take religion out of the equation. If the Act of Settlement hadn’t been passed, we’d have an entirely different monarchy. They were very political times.”

  “Sounds like a masterstroke.”

  “I suppose it was. I try to remain impartial but you can see the Jacobites’ point, can’t you?”

  “And the Jacobite movement died out some two hundred fifty years ago?” Tayte said. He was trying to understand why Marcus had urged him to hurry.

  “Not exactly. Many Jacobite societies exist today and there’s still plenty of support for the Stuart bloodline, largely in Scotland and to the north of England and perhaps surprisingly in America.”

  Tayte grinned. “Actually, that doesn’t surprise me at all.”

  He’d traced many American families back through Scottish immigrants in the 1700s, many of whom were transported for their Jacobite leanings. He drained his wine back and went for the bottle.

  “Do you mind if I help myself?”

  “Fill your boots,” Jean said. She checked her own glass. “I must be talking too much. I’ve hardly touched mine.”

  Tayte sat back again and got comfortable. “And what are the odds of a twenty-first century uprising these days?” It seemed laughable, but he had to ask. “I’m just wondering how treason fits into the picture.”

  “I think the odds are very slim,” Jean said. “Since the current heir to the Stuart bloodline - one Franz Herzog von Bayern of Bavaria - has shown no interest in pursuing a claim, I doubt that any related action against the Crown is on anyone’s agenda today - treasonable or otherwise.”

  Tayte was impressed. “Marcus was right about you,” he said. “You really know your stuff.”

  Jean smiled. “It’s mostly classroom material. I still keep in touch with a few students from when I taught at university who could really blow your socks off if you got them on to the right subject. Are you hungry yet? All this talking’s brought my appetite back.”

  “Sure,” Tayte said. “Let’s eat.”

  Somewhere in Greater London a shirtless man knelt before a raging fire. The light cast his shadow back across a derelict room, illuminating exposed brickwork, high broken windows and a tangle of iron pipework. He reached towards the flames with a narrow length of pipe and stirred the white coals again for good measure until the heat on his bare arm was almost unbearable.

  You never leave loose ends, he thought. You tie them up before you move on. No time for complacency. No time to sit around. Not now.

  As he retreated from the flames he considered the business he had to finish tonight. He turned his attention to the battered briefcase beside him and eyed the initials ‘MB’ on the clasp. He grabbed it and opened it upside down, spilling the contents in front of the fire, covering the dusty floor with certificates of births, marriages and deaths: connections to people whose lives he would sooner remain forgotten.

  Kneeling among the records, he fed them slowly and purposefully to the flames, topping off the pyre with the briefcase itself. He watched it all burn and when he was satisfied he put his shirt and coat back on and headed for the door. He had already removed from the briefcase the one thing he dared to keep: a black address book. He took it out from his coat pocket as he walked, smiling to himself now as he flicked through the pages, thinking, S is for Summer.

  “We get it in cardboard cartons back home,” Tayte said, digging his fork into a plastic tray of Singapore noodles and letting the tangled food slide onto his plate beside the char siu. They were eating at the breakfast bar in the kitchen. The oriental aromas made his mouth water.

  “I know,” Jean said. “I’ve seen it on telly.”

  “Right.”

  “I think I’d prefer cartons.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well, I’m sure the food wouldn’t sweat so much and, I don’t know, it always looks so romantic when you see a couple in a film curled up with chopsticks and the carton between them.”

  Tayte loved Chinese food but not like that. “It still sweats,” he said, crunching into a prawn cracker.

  They ate thoughtfully for a few minutes, then Jean said, “So where do we go from here?”

  Tayte picked up on the ‘we’ part straightaway. He was going to do whatever it took to help the police find his friend’s killer but he figured he’d be doing it alone.

  �
��I intend to follow in Marcus’s footsteps if I can,” he said. “You know, go through the same research. It could bring his killer after me. Could be dangerous.”

  “I know,” Jean said. “But I can help.”

  Tayte didn’t doubt it.

  “I think I’m already involved,” Jean added. “Whether I want to be or not.”

  She had Tayte there. He drew a long breath and held it briefly while he thought it through. “Okay,” he said. “I had an idea to go to The National Archives first thing in the morning. Marcus might have spoken to someone about what he was working on. Maybe one of his old colleagues knows something. We might even be able to pick up his research from the record logs.”

  “Great,” Jean said. “I can give you a lift.”

  “On your scooter?”

  “Who said it was a scooter?”

  When the meal was finished they went back into the sitting room and sat together on the sofa.

  “You know you can stay here tonight if it’s easier,” Jean said. Her cheeks flushed. “I just meant we could get a head start on things tomorrow, that’s all.”

  “I didn’t really come prepared,” Tayte said. He could see there was no hidden reason for her asking. No romantic agenda.

  “My son always leaves a few things here,” Jean said. “I’ve got a new toothbrush you can have and -” She paused and tested the sofa with her palm. “I’m sure it’s comfy.”

  It was clear to Tayte that Jean didn’t want to be alone tonight and he was flattered, even if it was just for the company, but he couldn’t stay.

  “I expect I can find you a clean T-shirt,” Jean continued. “Elliot’s into the baggy look. There must be something you can squeeze into. Sorry, I didn’t mean it to come out like that.”

  Tayte smiled. “That’s okay. No offence taken.”

  There was an edge of desperation to her tone that he found hard to refuse, but he knew it wouldn’t work. He liked his own space. It was all he was used to.

  “I’d appreciate the company,” Jean added, confirming his thoughts.