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

by Robinson, Steve

  Fable was already reading the contents. “Thank you, Harris,” he said, and when Harris didn’t leave, Fable looked up at him. “Something to add?”

  “There’s more to it, sir,” Harris said. “We found a mobile phone at Joseph Cornell’s house. I don’t know why it wasn’t picked up earlier. The memory’s been wiped but the number matches with the other number on the report.”

  “Interesting,” Fable said. “Any prints?”

  “None, sir. The phone’s been wiped, too. The lab found traces of a chemical residue commonly used to clean computer screens - isopropyl alcohol.”

  Fable nodded to himself. “Let me know when anything else turns up,” he said. “Preferably Joseph Cornell.”

  As Harris left, Fable turned his attention back to the log. “There’s a text here dated three months ago,” he said. “Julian Davenport’s address in Bermondsey.” He flicked through a few pages. “Here’s another more recently for the Exeter murder.” He turned another page. “And here’s Peter Harper’s address in Surrey. That text was sent less than twenty-four hours ago. Not long before Harper was abducted.”

  Jean leant in on her elbows. Her hands were knotted in front of her. “So Robert Cornell was definitely working with his brother?” she said. Her voice had an urgency to it and Tayte understood why. It meant there was still hope for Elliot.

  “Looks that way,” Fable said. He paused. “Your address is here, too,” he added, skipping another page. “And Carlton House Terrace. That was sent to Robert Cornell yesterday morning.”

  “The Royal Society,” Tayte said. “No surprise then that he was waiting for us when we left.” He tried to peer at the log. “What’s on the pages you keep skipping?”

  “The garbage, I guess,” Fable said. “That’s all the actual messages there are.”

  “Mind if I take a look?”

  Fable spun the log around. Between the text messages providing the names and addresses of Robert Cornell’s victims were a number of texts containing a single numeric character. The majority were zeros and ones and Tayte instantly saw them for what they were. He felt goosebumps ripple through him.

  “It’s the ahnentafel,” he said. He counted the numbers. There were thirty in total. “Is there someplace nearby where we can eat? I get the feeling this is going to be another long night and I’m no good on an empty stomach. The ahnentafel looks complete.”

  “Christ,” Fable said. “And it’s been sent to Joseph Cornell.” He lowered his head into his hands, the implied threat rekindled. “This thing isn’t over at all, is it?”

  “No, it’s not,” Tayte said, recalling that Robert Cornell had told him it was only just beginning.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The restaurant DI Fable took them to was an Italian he sometimes used called Franco’s. It was a three-minute walk from his office and during that time Fable smoked four cigarettes and didn’t say a word. Tayte thought the place struck a fine balance between authentic Italian and touristy: the staff looked Italian, the vinyl tablecloths looked like draped Italian flags and a Dean Martin CD was playing in the background. The tables, topped with Chianti bottle candle holders, were nearly all occupied and the air was lively to the extent that you could talk without having to whisper or worry about being overheard. Jean sat opposite Fable and Tayte sat on the end beside her with the folder containing the SMS logs occupying the only vacant place-setting. They ordered their meals and Fable just asked for a cup of coffee.

  “Don’t you eat?” Tayte asked him, helping himself to the bread and olives. The air was heavy with the smell of basil and garlic and simmering tomato-based sauces. It made his stomach groan.

  Fable smiled. “It has been known,” he said. “But coffee’s good for now.” He indicated the folder. “So what exactly have we got here? Some kind of map to a royal heir?”

  “It could be,” Tayte said. “If Jean’s theory stacks up.” He opened the folder. “Looking at how Cornell sent these digits, I’d say it was about as safe a way to do it as there is. These text messages wouldn’t mean a thing to anyone who didn’t know exactly what they were looking for - just garbage, as your colleague said.”

  He flicked through the sheets. “According to the date stamps, Robert Cornell sent the first three blocks of numbers one digit at a time over the three-month period since Davenport was murdered.”

  “Three blocks?” Fable said.

  Tayte nodded. “There were already two victims from the Sherwood Forest murders twenty years ago - Douglas Jones and Sarah Groves. Davenport was number three.”

  “Right,” Fable said.

  Jean stabbed an olive with a cocktail stick and hovered it near her mouth. “There was no point letting the numbers he already had go any sooner.”

  Tayte held up one of the sheets of paper. “After Robert Cornell received Alexander Walsh’s address in Exeter we see five more texts - four binary numbers followed by the decimal number two.” He found another sheet, studied it and offered it up. “Then late yesterday afternoon there’s a text with Peter Harper’s details. And just this morning, five more digits were sent in separate text messages an hour or so apart.”

  He lifted out the last sheet in the log. “These last five digits must be Robert Cornell’s or maybe it’s the other way round. It doesn’t matter. We have the decimal sequence numbers. All we have to do is reassemble the digits in the right order based on the number at the end of each block.”

  “So after all that he went and put all his eggs in one basket,” Fable said.

  “In a manner of speaking, yes,” Tayte said. “He had to. While he had us tied up he intimated that he’d found the descendants the same way we did. But clearly he couldn’t do the genealogy required to find his victims or to understand the ahnentafel itself once it had been compiled. He had to trust someone who could.”

  “Which is where his brother comes in,” Fable said.

  Tayte had been thinking about that. The other phone found at Joseph Cornell’s house was hard to ignore, but it didn’t add up.

  “I don’t doubt that Joseph Cornell’s involved, given what we know. But unless there’s something you’ve not told us, I don’t think he’s a genealogist, is he?”

  “No, I don’t believe so,” Fable said. “Not much call for that in the military or the police service. Maybe it was a hobby?”

  “Any related material found at his home? Any books on the subject? Records or certificates?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “I didn’t think so. Working through ten generations as we had to at Kew takes a lot of expertise and it would be hard to do all that and not leave a trail.”

  Their drinks arrived and Tayte held on to the waitress’s arm as he downed his cola and ordered another.

  Jean sipped her wine. “You think Michel Levant’s involved, don’t you?”

  Tayte gathered from her tone and from recent conversations that she thought he was on some personal crusade to discredit the man who had just saved their lives. Maybe he was, but not without good reason to his mind.

  “What if the brother was just the middle man?” Tayte said.

  Fable went for the sugar. “Something as sensitive to Robert Cornell as this? Why involve more people than he needed to? Brother or not.”

  “I don’t know why Joseph Cornell had the other phone at his home,” Tayte said. “But they needed an expert genealogist - or a damn good heir hunter. I don’t see how it could be anyone else.”

  Fable poured two sachets of sugar into his coffee and slowly stirred it in. When he looked up again there was a subtle flick at the corner of his mouth as though something had amused him.

  “Joseph Cornell looks guilty as hell from where I’m sitting,” he said. “There’s the phone and the fact that he’s doing a grand job of staying off our radar. And if you’re looking for a genealogist to point the finger at, I might remind you that there are a great many in London just now. How many did you say turned up at Kew? Forty or so wasn’t it? Then the
re’s all those experts at the convention who couldn’t make it. What exactly do you think you’ve got on Levant anyway?”

  Tayte took a deep breath and held on to it, thinking. “He was at the restaurant when Marcus Brown was murdered. They had an uncomfortable conversation just before the shooting. I told you about that at the interview afterwards.”

  “And Levant told me they were old friends, catching up. Did you actually hear the conversation?”

  Tayte shook his head. “No, I didn’t. But we know Levant was interested in Marcus’s work. He told us as much after the interviews. So why else is he so interested?”

  “You told me he’s a probate genealogist. Maybe he got a sniff of something that made him curious.”

  “Yeah,” Tayte said. “So curious that he’s been tracking our movements from the start.” He put his hand on the SMS logs. “Now we’ve got text messages feeding Robert Cornell our locations - places where Levant saw us go and where Cornell subsequently attacked us.”

  “It doesn’t mean Levant sent the messages,” Fable said. “Believe me, Robert’s brother Joseph is more than qualified to have kept you under very close personal surveillance if he wanted to.”

  “Well what about that gallant rescue?” Tayte offered. “All by himself? A man like that? I mean, come on.”

  “Aren’t all rescues gallant by definition?”

  Tayte shook his head. He was losing this and he knew it. “And I don’t buy Levant’s suggestion that he carries a Taser around in his pants,” he said. “I don’t buy it any more than I believe he forgot to charge his mobile phone, for Christ sakes.”

  “What you believe is entirely irrelevant,” Fable said. He paused. “Look, I don’t mean to give you a hard time but you don’t have a damn thing on Michel Levant, do you?”

  “What about hunches?” Tayte said. “You told me yourself you like to run with them.”

  Fable knocked his coffee back. “Yes, I do. And they can lead to solid results. You might be right about Levant but we can’t go after him with what you’ve just told me. As far as the outside world is concerned he single-handedly saved the lives of the people who identified a cold-bloodied killer and took one more scumbag off the streets. The man’s a hero. That’s what everyone will be reading in the papers tomorrow morning.”

  He sat back heavily in his seat and pinched his eyes. “Look, I’m sorry,” he added. “Like I said, I don’t mean to give you a hard time but you can leave the detective work to me. If Levant’s involved he’ll slip up somewhere. And when he does, I’ll be right in his face.” He tapped the SMS log. “This ahnentafel. That’s your priority, and since it’s complete and we know it’s out there, we need to solve it first.”

  Tayte bit his lip and let it go. As frustrated as he felt, he knew Fable was right and he could hardly mistake the message he was sending him. Stick to what you’re good at, Tayte. He went back to the folder. His notepad was still in the rubble where Robert Cornell had thrown it for all he knew so he borrowed Fable’s and wrote down all thirty numbers in the order they had been sent. Then he wrote the binary numbers down again in the order dictated by the decimal sequence number that followed each binary block.

  “Six descendants and six four-digit binary segments,” he said. “That’s twenty-four digits and twenty-three generations.”

  “So where do you start with something like that?” Fable asked.

  Tayte looked at the binary string. He offered it up. 1100 0100 0011 1000 0011 1000. “We start with the first digit,” he said. “In this case, that’s the hard part. It’s the seed. Always the number one, it represents our subject - the descendant.”

  “Another descendant?” Fable said.

  Tayte nodded and pointed to the last digit in the string. “Although, it’s this ancestor we’re interested in for now. The zero tells us it’s a male, twenty-three generations back from the subject. But that’s all it tells us. Right now I’ve no idea what century either was born in, let alone whose family tree they belong to.”

  Fable sighed so hard that Tayte could smell the coffee and tobacco on his breath.

  “By definition,” he continued, “a secret heir would have to have been brought up by a family that only a handful of people knew about - like our five Fellows of the Royal Society. We’re running with the theory that this ahnentafel will identify that bloodline and in doing so point to Queen Anne’s heir. But we need to know the bloodline in the first place.”

  “The chicken and egg scenario?” Fable said.

  “Looks that way. But I don’t believe it can be. It just needs some thought and a clear head. I’ve told you how things look but I can’t be seeing it right.”

  The food arrived and Tayte thought the nourishment would help. He watched it land, took a little black pepper and Parmesan cheese with his bolognese and dove right in. There was no need to tuck his napkin in. His shirt and suit couldn’t get much dirtier.

  Fable gathered the SMS logs into the folder. He tore the page Tayte had been writing on from his notepad and handed it to him. “So, you’ve got all you need from the logs?”

  Tayte nodded, concentrating on the food that tasted as good to him as any condemned man’s last meal. The ahnentafel was laid out in binary on the scrap of paper. It wasn’t going to be easy to work it out but everything he had to go on was there.

  Fable’s phone rang inside his jacket. “Good,” he said, getting up to take the call. “Just remember that we need to get there first.”

  Tayte watched Fable go and he had a cigarette in his mouth by the time he reached the door. As soon as he was outside, he lit it awkwardly and pressed his phone to his ear as the cigarette began to dance in time with his conversation. Tayte turned back to Jean and noticed she’d hardly touched her food and that her wine was long gone.

  “How are you holding up?” he asked her. “It’s gone kind of quiet over there.”

  Jean tried a smile. “I’ve been away with my thoughts, that’s all. I’ll snap out of it in a minute.”

  “I hope so,” Tayte said. “I think I’m getting to like the sound of your voice. I missed it.” He paused. “So you’re not suffering from post traumatic stress or anything like that?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No, I guess not - tough biker chick like you.”

  That made her smile. “I don’t think anyone’s ever called me a chick before. Even when I was young enough to be one.”

  “Really? We say it all the time back home.”

  “You personally?”

  Tayte laughed at that idea. “No, not me. But people do, generally. Or they did back when I was in high school. I think kids have an entirely different vocabulary now.”

  “I know,” Jean said in such a way that Tayte knew he’d brought her thoughts back to Elliot again.

  He locked eyes with her and gently squeezed her hand. “We’ll find him,” he told her for the second time that day, having no real understanding as to how he would make that happen, knowing only that he must.

  Jean’s pensive smile seemed to thank him for his kindness. “Anyway,” she said, sounding a little brighter. “How are you holding up? You’re the one who just got a grilling off the detective inspector.”

  Tayte snorted. “We’ve both been through a whole lot worse than that today, don’t you think?” He laughed. “He was kind of grouchy though, wasn’t he?”

  “I’m sure he didn’t mean to be,” Jean said. “I think we’ll all feel better after a good night’s sleep.”

  “Don’t tease me,” Tayte said. “You don’t know how much I’m looking forward to that - whenever that might be.”

  Fable returned with his wallet in his hand. “We need to go,” he said, waving it at one of the staff. “The hospital called.” He looked at Tayte. “Harper’s asking for you.”

  “He’s talking? What did he say?”

  “Not much. ‘Get Tayte.’ That’s all. I hope he’ll have more for us when we get there.”

  Tayte gazed longingly at his
pasta and thought the news both good luck and bad timing. The wide bowl was still half full, his stomach considerably more than half empty. He sighed and stuffed a ball of spaghetti into his mouth as he got up, realising that Harper must have heard his name. He must have heard his questions, too, and he hoped he was about to answer them.

  When Tayte and Jean arrived at the hospital with DI Fable, Peter Harper was no longer in a position to answer anything. He was dead. They received the news in a consulting room soon after their arrival and were left with a nervous-looking uniformed police officer called Wilkins, who had been with Harper since he was admitted. Fable got straight to the point.

  “Well, did he say anything else besides asking for Mr Tayte?”

  “He could hardly speak at all, sir,” Wilkins said. “He asked for Mr Tayte then he went quiet for several minutes before he spoke again.”

  “Well get to it, lad,” Fable said. “What did he say?”

  Wilkins swallowed dryly. “Well, it didn’t really make much sense as I heard it. It sounded like he said, horror-bus.”

  “Ouroboros?” Jean said. “Was that it?”

  “It could have been, Miss.”

  Jean threw Tayte a knowing glance. “It’s about Quo Veritas,” she said to Fable. “Ouroboros is a self-consuming dragon, depicted in a circle, continually eating its own tail. I saw it when I went to Nottinghamshire. The journalist included a drawing in one of his articles showing it as part of the society’s emblem.”

  “What does it mean?” Fable asked.

  Jean looked blank.

  “Mr Tayte?”

  Tayte puffed his cheeks out. “Not much at this time,” he said. “But it was a dying man’s last word. Whatever it means it must be important.”

  “Something to do with the ahnentafel?”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Tayte said.

  Fable made for the door. “I’ll drop you back at your hotel. Sounds like you two need some quiet time to get your heads together.” In the corridor outside, he added, “Call me as soon as you get a breakthrough. And don’t talk about this to anyone else. I’m your only contact.”