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

by Robinson, Steve

  Twenty seconds later Tayte emerged from the crowd behind Jean like a drowning man coming up for air. He saw a contortionist on all fours, staring up at him with her face upside down. Behind her he saw a man with a microphone, dressed like a circus ringmaster.

  “We have a volunteer, ladies and gentlemen!”

  At the edge of the crowd to his left, Tayte saw the man who had come from the market. He was a gaunt, sinewy man with hollow cheeks and a shaved head. Put a straw hat on him and Tayte thought he would have made a good scarecrow.

  “That’s him,” Jean said. “Run!”

  They headed for the stage where there were fewer people. One of the performers tried to grab Tayte’s arm as he passed, smiling playfully, but Tayte dodged him. He glanced back. The scarecrow was coming for them across the arena. Tayte saw one of the performers reach for him and the man made no attempt to dodge. Instead, he slammed the base of his palm into the performer’s face, knocking him down like a bowling pin.

  Tayte refocused on getting out of there. They cleared the stage area beneath the portico and the gathering seemed to part for them, only Tayte soon realised it wasn’t for them. The key speaker had arrived to a cheering crowd. He had a foldaway bicycle with him, trousers still clipped around his ankles.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the man on the PA said, seeming to ignore the fracas that had just stirred the crowd on the other side of the arena. “The Right Honourable Mr Trenton McAlister MP!”

  Tayte almost ran into him. He tripped over the front wheel of his bicycle instead. “Sorry,” he called back, getting to his feet.

  At that moment Tayte saw the scarecrow again. He was at the end of the parting, not twenty feet away. A thin smile slowly split his face, prompting Tayte to grab his briefcase, turn on his heel and run after Jean as the crowd began to close in.

  The timing conjured biblical connotations in Tayte’s mind. It was like Moses and the Israelites - the parting of the Red Sea now returned to devour the enemy. Tayte wished it would, but as he emerged on the other side he knew the crowd would only buy them a few seconds. From then on they would be in the open.

  Jean was waiting for him across the street, waving frantically. “Come on! We can cut across The Strand. It’s not far to the Embankment.”

  Tayte didn’t know what was at the Embankment and he didn’t ask. As they ran down the first street they came to, all he was interested in was a taxi but he couldn’t see any. When they were halfway to the main road, he glanced back and saw their pursuers turn into the street after them. He ran harder and somehow he managed to overtake Jean. It was downhill all the way and his weight gave him momentum. He was panting fiercely by the time they reached the main road.

  “I don’t know how long I can keep this up,” he said.

  “Just remember they want to kill us,” Jean said. “It works for me.”

  That thought kept Tayte going. They crossed The Strand, taking their chances with the traffic. His jacket suddenly felt two sizes too small, like it was crushing the air from his chest, making it hard to breathe. Behind him, he heard a car horn and figured whoever was chasing them had just crossed the road after them. He thought about grabbing Jean and ducking into one of the shops, but he didn’t think that would offer any kind of sanctuary and Jean seemed to have a plan. He only wished he knew what it was. He looked for a taxi again. The few he could see were either going the other way or were already occupied. Jean turned left into a narrow side street that ran out to a steep bank of steps, which they took two at a time.

  “You think you can make the park?” she said, indicating the trees further down beyond the high buildings that now crowded in on either side of them.

  The street was quiet - no one else around. Fire escapes and commercial bins lined their way and the air reeked of rotting kitchen waste. At the bottom of the steps another narrow street began to slope away. The park was two hundred metres at most.

  “I’ll make it,” Tayte said, hoping that he could.

  They crossed a narrow intersection with another quiet road and the trees and mature shrubs that marked the boundary of Victoria Embankment Gardens seemed real to Tayte for the first time. Nothing, however, seemed as real as the muted gunshots he heard behind him as chunks of paving suddenly blistered at his feet.

  “They’re shooting at us, for Christ sakes!”

  As he continued to run for his life, curiosity got the better of him and he looked over his shoulder again. The scarecrow had cleared the steps and his partner was close behind him. When Tayte turned back to Jean he knew he was slowing down. She’d gained twenty paces on him and was almost at the park gate. It was a single, wrought iron gate - a minor access point. Tayte’s legs felt like lead pendulums swinging beneath him as he focused on it. But what then? The park was no safe haven either. What was Jean thinking? It didn’t seem to matter. Over the sound of his own wheezing lungs he heard the scarecrow’s voice for the first time.

  “You’re mine now!”

  Tayte didn’t have enough energy left to doubt it. He knew he should have ditched his briefcase when they left Covent Garden but he couldn’t bring himself to part with it any more than he wanted to lose all the paperwork that was inside. He thought about making a stand. At least maybe Jean could get away. He was the bigger man after all. But he knew he didn’t have the skills. The men chasing him in all probability did and there were two of them. They would be on him in seconds and if that happened he thought Jean would try to help him.

  That thought alone decided him. He got mad at the idea and kicked his legs harder, running flat out down the slope, barely able to control himself. He saw that Jean was now on the other side of the gate.

  Why is she waiting? Why doesn’t she run?

  “Come on!” she yelled, spurring him on. “Don’t look back.”

  Tayte shot through the opening like a sprinter crossing the finish line. Then he caught an exposed tree root and fell headlong into a flower border. He heard the gate clank shut behind him and turned to see that Jean had locked it with the disc lock from her bike. The scarecrow crashed into it, clawing at Jean through the bars as she backed away.

  She yelled at Tayte. “Get up!”

  Tayte needed to catch his breath but the pop of another silenced gunshot and the puff of dirt in the border between his legs quickly got him to his feet.

  “They’ll be over that gate in seconds,” Jean said, grabbing Tayte’s arm. “We’ve got to keep moving.”

  Somewhere along the way, Tayte thought Professor Jean Summer had turned into the personal trainer from Hell. He was on his feet again, trying to run, but the lactic acid in his muscles was shutting him down. They crossed the colourful gardens in thirty seconds, unhindered. Jean’s disc lock seemed to have delayed their pursuers, but when they emerged from the main gates, close to Embankment Underground Station, it was clear that at least one of them had thought around the problem.

  The blonde-haired man had skirted the park fence. He announced himself by grabbing Jean’s hair as she ran out ahead of Tayte and without thinking Tayte charged at him, ramming him with the hard end of his briefcase. It knocked him back and they were running again, in through the Tube station entrance and out the other side, heading for the river. Tayte had no idea where the other man was and he hoped he never saw him again.

  “What about the subway?” he called.

  “There’s no time. I saw the other one in the park. He’s coming.”

  They crossed the road, playing chicken with the traffic. Cars swerved and horns blared.

  “The pier!” Jean said and they made for it.

  There was a river boat there - a river bus according to the signs. It was red and white with blue seats and clear panelled roof sections fore and aft. Jean must have seen that it was about to leave. As they ran along the walkway a member of staff was putting up the safety chain.

  “Wait!” Tayte yelled.

  The man paused long enough to allow them onto the covered platform and within seconds the boa
t was moving. Looking back, with only a few metres between the boat and the pier, their pursuers came out onto the walkway after them, but they were too late. Tayte watched them reach the pier and stop. He saw the man whose gaunt face he would never forget slap the rail in bitter defeat, staring after them as Tayte turned away and collapsed into a breathless heap on the deck.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The River Tours service operated on a hop-on, hop-off basis, which Tayte thought was just as well under the circumstances. He and Jean remained outside in the sunshine and Tayte was glad of the breeze off the river to cool him down.

  “Do you stop at Shadwell?” he asked the ticket man, still catching his breath.

  The man shook his head.

  “How about Canary Wharf?” Jean asked.

  “Service terminates at St Katherine’s, after Tower Bridge.”

  “Terminates?” Tayte said. “Don’t you stop anywhere else?”

  “Weekdays, we run a loop from Westminster, stopping at Embankment and St Katherine’s. That’s it.”

  “How long does it take?”

  “To St Katherine’s? Twenty-five minutes.”

  Tayte checked his watch to get a reference: it was almost two p.m. He paid the fares one way to St Katherine’s Pier and sank forward on his elbows.

  “We’re screwed,” he said. “They’ll know where we’re getting off.”

  Jean agreed.

  “How long will it take them by road?”

  “Ten minutes - maybe fifteen. Depends on the traffic, but they’ll need a car first.”

  “Tayte scoffed. “They’ll have one nearby. Those guys were organised.”

  “Then they’ll be waiting for us.”

  “Yes, they will.”

  The boat was quiet. Tayte could only see a handful of people aboard: some outside and a few more inside beneath the canopy. There were no children. As the boat headed east along the Thames at a gentle pace, Tayte wondered again who wanted to stop them from solving the ahnentafel, but he quickly concluded that it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that they didn’t succeed.

  “I figure we’ve got about twenty minutes to come up with a way off this boat,” he said.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” Jean said. “We need to call the police.”

  Tayte knew it was the sensible thing to do. Their lives were at stake. They could have the police meet them at the pier. It wouldn’t matter who else was there waiting for them. They wouldn’t do anything with the police around.

  “But what then?” he said. “We’d be detained. We’d have to answer all kinds of difficult questions. Things we don’t want to get into right now.”

  “I meant Detective Fable,” Jean said. “He helped us out before. He could do it again.”

  Tayte thought about it. The only thing that stopped him reaching for the BlackBerry was the fact that he knew as soon as he turned it on he’d be broadcasting their location to any interested party. He figured anyone with Internet access had a good chance of locating them.

  “Can you swim?” Jean asked.

  Tayte peered over the side of the boat. It was a short drop into the murky river. “I tried it once or twice in a pool,” he said. “When I was a kid. I vowed not to make a habit of it.”

  “You don’t fancy it then?”

  Tayte looked out, wide-eyed. “Swim to shore?”

  The boat had crossed towards the south bank and was now right of centre in the direction of travel, having just passed beneath Waterloo Bridge. The water looked choppy from the wash off the other boats and Tayte figured that if he went in from here, his body would have to be winched out again when it eventually washed up further down.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t fancy it at all. I guess I’ve spent too much of my life sitting in archive rooms when I should have been at the beach.”

  “So call Fable.”

  Tayte didn’t waste a second getting the pieces of the BlackBerry out of his pocket. He figured whoever was trying to kill them already knew where they were anyway so he reassembled the phone, switched it on and was greeted with a message asking him to enter the PIN code. He hadn’t thought about that. He showed it to Jean, still thinking about the river and the banquet he might yet make for the crabs and the crayfish.

  “Try all ones,” Jean said. “It’s a factory default.”

  Tayte did. It worked. He found Fable’s number and hit the dial button. After several rings the call went to voicemail and Tayte ended the call.

  “That’s just great,” he said. He tried again, wondering where Fable was and more importantly, why he wasn’t picking up. The call went to voicemail again.

  “No good?” Jean said.

  Tayte shook his head. He thought about leaving a message but there seemed little point. By the time Fable picked it up it would be too late. He switched the phone off and popped the battery out again - paranoia getting the better of him.

  “Fifteen minutes left to come up with a plan,” he said.

  DI Jack Fable was in Kew at The National Archives. Something Tayte had said at the Italian restaurant the night before had stuck in his mind - about how difficult it would be to find the descendants of the hanged Fellows of the Royal Society without leaving a trail. He’d been in a quiet corner of the Document Reading Room for the last hour, studying record request logs.

  The idea was simple enough. Every record requested at The National Archives was logged in the system. All he had to do was take a line of research that the team of genealogists had already worked through and correlate the records they needed to see with any recent requests for the same information. If anyone showed a particular interest in the descendants of these long dead Fellows of the Royal Society, it would single that person out.

  Fable wasn’t naive enough to think that whoever that was had used their own name; he knew that a clever man would never do that, especially if he knew his research might lead to murder. But what if, when he’d first started out, he hadn’t known he was identifying a killer’s next victim? He might not have foreseen the need for caution then. That’s what Fable was hoping.

  It would take time, and Fable knew the process would have to be repeated at the General Register Office for all the other pertinent records, but time was on his side and he knew he was on to something. Even if the killer’s researcher had used a different alias every visit, he would find the dates and times of the record requests that correlated with the genealogists research trail. The CCTV images from the lobby could be vetted to see who had entered the building before each request and a recurrent face would soon stand out. Maybe it would be a face he or someone else recognised.

  The River Tours boat that was taking Tayte and Jean to St Katherine’s Pier was five minutes from its destination. The best plan they had come up with to avoid the inevitable encounter when they docked was to wait until the boat was close to the pier and then slip into the river while everyone else was getting off, staying low, using the other passengers as a curtain against anyone looking from shore. Given Tayte’s lack of proficiency in the water he was nervous about the idea and he doubted there were enough people aboard to give them the kind of cover they needed for long, but there were now very few options left open to them.

  They had just come in sight of a museum warship on the south bank to their right, which Jean had said was a Royal Navy light cruiser called HMS Belfast. It had been in permanent dock on the Thames for forty years, she’d said, and she was still talking about it now, only Tayte was no longer listening. He was having a heart attack. He grabbed his left arm suddenly, like a wasp had stung it. He drew a sharp breath and clenched his fist to his sternum. Then he fell off his chair.

  “JT!”

  The few other passengers turned to see what was going on. Jean was down on her knees in an instant, trying to unlock Tayte from the foetal position he’d tightened into.

  “JT, what is it?”

  His words were strained. “My heart.”

  One of the staff ran over. �
��What’s happened?”

  “He’s having a heart attack.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “He just told me,” Jean said. “Look at him. We had to run for the boat. It must have been too much for him. He needs a hospital.”

  “Help me sit him up,” the man said. To Tayte, he added, “Try to stay calm, sir. That’s it.”

  They helped Tayte into a seated position on the deck, propping him up against the side of the boat.

  “Keep him still while I call ahead for an ambulance,” the man said. Then as he went to make the call, Tayte began to groan.

  “Get me off this boat.”

  He winked at Jean and watched her jaw drop as she caught on. The man turned back and Tayte drew another sharp breath before scrunching his eyes shut.

  “What if he doesn’t make it to St Katherine’s?” Jean said. “You need to stop the boat at the next pier.”

  “That’s Tower Millennium Pier.”

  “I don’t care what it’s called. Just get us there.”

  As the man rushed away Jean moved in and pulled one of Tayte’s eyelids open. “I could thump you,” she whispered.

  “I only just thought of it,” Tayte said. “Besides, a genuine reaction is always more effective, don’t you think?”

  “You just didn’t want to go in that river, did you?”

  “There is that,” Tayte admitted.

  Within a couple of minutes the boat was alongside Tower Millennium Pier on the north bank and Tayte was suddenly feeling much better.

  “I guess it could have been wind,” he said to a worried looking member of staff as they disembarked. He had an arm resting on Jean’s shoulder for support, keeping up the act until they were clear.

  As the boat pulled out again, heading towards Tower Bridge and St Katherine’s Pier, Tayte surveyed their new surroundings. They were on a platform outside the Tower of London.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get a cab to Shadwell before our friends waiting downstream realise we got off.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven