“Nullius in Verba,” Dattani said. “The Royal Society’s motto, taken from Horace. It more or less means to take no one’s word for it.”
“To prove it,” Jean said.
“Precisely. After all, that is the essence of science, isn’t it?
They continued walking, passing gilt-framed portraits of former notable Fellows such as Sir Isaac Newton and John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal. Dattani paused when he came to a portrait of founder member and diarist, John Evelyn.
“Did you know that when the society was founded it was called the Invisible College for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning?”
“No,” Tayte said. “That’s quite a mouthful.”
Dattani gave a small laugh. “Quite. Which is why in 1663, when King Charles II gave the society his Royal Charter, it became known as the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. Or more commonly now, the Royal Society of London. It’s the oldest society of its kind in the world.”
“How long have you been at these premises?” Jean asked.
“We’ve been here at Carlton House Terrace since 1967,” Dattani said. “Before that the society made its home at Burlington House for almost a hundred years after moving from cramped accommodation at Somerset House.”
They reached the library through a carved, oak-panelled door and Hampshire and Hues, who had dropped behind, were suddenly at their heels again. Tayte thought the room looked just how a library should look, with high ceilings and decorative stuccowork on the walls and on the ceiling cornices. There were plaster busts of other past Fellows between the carved bookcases that lined the walls and a long mahogany table dominated the centre of the room, which was surrounded by carver chairs upholstered in green to match the carpet. Tayte thought the place smelled right, too: old books and polish.
“We’ve over seventy-thousand titles in our library,” Dattani said.
Tayte was still taking the room in. “How far back do your records go?” He was keen to confirm that the records covered the dates he and Jean were interested in.
“Our earliest records date circa 1470,” Dattani said. “Although locked away in temperature controlled vaults in the basement we have a document that dates as far back as the twelfth century.”
Tayte arched his eyebrows, thinking that the early 1700s should be no problem.
“The archives are pretty much all digitised now,” Dattani added, noting Tayte’s interest in the few keyboards and computer screens at the end of the table.
Tayte opened his briefcase and pulled out his laptop. “Okay if I use this? I’m used to the setup.”
“Of course,” Dattani said. “Everything’s online. I’ll sign you in for the day. There’s an Ethernet cable if you need wired access.”
Tayte wasn’t surprised to hear that the Royal Society had gone digital. Pay-per-view documents were big business and this was one time when he was happy to forgo the sights and smells of old documents in favour of a powerful search engine. He knew it would have otherwise taken far too long to physically find all the information the society had on the five Fellows they had come to learn about. Jean sat at one of the keyboards and Tayte sat beside her with his laptop. It only took a few minutes to get set up and logged in.
“So, who are we looking for?” Dattani said, sitting at the keyboard opposite Jean, clearly intending to help.
Tayte had no problem with that. It would be easy to miss something given the time constraints and three heads were definitely better than two under the circumstances. He brought Dattani up to date on their findings at Kew, telling him about the fate of the five men and the charges of high treason.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” Dattani said. He tapped at his keyboard. “I just entered ‘Jacobite’ into the search field of our Library and Archive Catalogues. There are twenty names listed - John Byrom, Robert Harley, Voltaire. Even Sir Christopher Wren is reputed to have held secret Jacobite meetings after lectures.”
Tayte read out the names and dates from his notebook and Dattani confirmed they were all on the list.
“In what context?” Tayte asked.
“Let’s see,” Dattani said. A moment later he added, “The Screw Plot. 1708.”
“I know a little about that,” Jean said. “It was at St Paul’s Cathedral.”
Dattani nodded. “They were arrested for plotting to assassinate Queen Anne, accused of loosening the screws in the support beams above the Queen’s seating area.”
Jean looked incredulous. “But it was proved to be a hoax. Something the Tories used to discredit the Whigs. The loose screws were attributed to poor construction work.”
“I really couldn’t say,” Dattani said. “But I do know that Dr Bartholomew Hutton was Physician in Ordinary to several members of the Royal Stuart family at one time or another. He attended Anne during the five years leading up to her Coronation. I’m sure you’re right. I can’t think why he would have been caught up in an attempt on Queen Anne’s life.”
Tayte and Jean exchanged glances. It sounded like an all too easy setup. But why?
“He was into anagrams if I’m not mistaken.” Dattani continued.
“Anagrams?” Tayte repeated.
Dattani nodded. “They were very popular in his day, what with the likes of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. They formed a group called the Scriblerus Club. But that was in 1712. Four years too late for Dr Hutton. Although I’d be surprised if he didn’t know them.”
They each began to feed the names into the archive search engine.
“Given the dates,” Dattani said. “We need only concern ourselves with the Philosophical Transactions. That was the Royal Society’s publication at the time. It first appeared in 1665 - the oldest English language journal in the world.”
Tayte was already looking at a scanned image on his laptop. It bore the lavish title, ‘PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. Giving Some ACCOUNT of the Undertakings, Studies and Labours of the INGENIOUS in many Considerable Parts of the WORLD. VOL. XXIII. For the Years 1701, 1702.’
Tayte began his search with the Reverend Naismith, whose field of research was mathematical statistics. Several results were returned and he noted that the majority were letters. As he read the heading for the first matching entry, which was entitled ‘Some New Observations Drawn from the Constant Regularity Observ’d in the Mortality of Infant Births’, he knew this was going to take some time.
Heading east along the busy Mile End Road near Stepney Green, a man in a smart grey suit was driving a silver Ford Mondeo, killing time in the traffic.
Waiting.
If you’re going to steal a car, he thought. You do it no more than an hour before you need it. Two hours at most. That’s the trick. It’s a mistake to be too prepared. Steal the car the night before and the owner has time to notice it’s gone. They have time to report it and someone else has time to spot it and point the finger. That’s the way of the amateur - people who think that if they leave it until the last minute they won’t be able to find a car to boost in time.
He shook his head. “That’s not the way to do it,” he said to himself.
There’s always a car to be had in London. You just have to be confident. It’s not like you care what colour it is. Who gives a shit if it’s got leather and a decent stereo? You’re not going to be together very long, are you? It’s not like you’ve just taken out a five-year loan to pay for the thing.
And that’s just it.
You never hang on to it. Not ever. When it’s served its purpose the thing to do is drive a mile out from the scene, park up anywhere you like and calmly get out and walk to the Underground with everyone else. You take the Tube from there. That’s how you do it. That’s the confident way. You don’t take it home to bed for the night in case you need it again the next day.
He laughed to himself. “That’s just plain stupid.”
And it will get you caught.
The mobile phone in his breast pocket began to beep. He sl
owed the car and checked the display. It was the text message he’d been waiting for. As he read it his face gave no hint of the pleasure he felt. Conversely, his body began to tense and tingle with such energy that he could barely control it. His hands were clenched so tightly on the wheel that his knuckles looked ready to pop through his driving gloves. He liked the gloves. He liked how a steering wheel felt through the leather in the same way he liked the sense of command and control he felt when his gloved hand was coiled around the grip of a gun.
He arrived at a junction and slammed the brakes hard, veering right and using the handbrake to help spin the car around before he floored the accelerator. He knew London like the owner of the black cab he’d stolen twenty-four hours ago to take care of Marcus Brown. He’d made a point of knowing his way around town. Being familiar with your environment was key to survival; he’d had that drummed into him enough times. As was blending in with that environment. Going unnoticed. For that, a grey suit was the perfect urban camouflage.
He glanced at the message on his phone’s display again and hit the delete button. He was heading west now to an address he knew was close to The Mall - The Royal Society at Carlton House Terrace. It wouldn’t take long to get there. He would have plenty of time to learn the area, confirm his vantage point and available exits.
After countless cups of coffee and almost three hours of research at the Royal Society, Jefferson Tayte sat up and pushed his laptop away. He pinched his eyes and glanced over at officers Hampshire and Hues who could not have looked more fed up if they tried. He checked his watch. The glowing red digits told him it was almost five p.m. Time to wrap things up.
“Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.” He looked across the table at Rakesh Dattani who still appeared as fresh as when they had started. He was upright and perky in his chair as though he still had plenty of research time left in him. “Rakesh, why don’t you kick us off with our soldier, Stephen Henley.”
Rakesh Dattani stopped taking notes. “Sir Stephen ‘Naseby’ Henley was -”
“Naseby?” Tayte interrupted. “As in the battle of Naseby?”
“1645,” Jean said. “The English Civil War.”
“Same spelling,” Dattani said. “I expect his father or even his grandfather fought in the battle and they adopted the name. Anyway, Sir Stephen Henley was later wounded during the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and withdrew from military service. After that, as an architect, he worked in collaboration on the designs of several country estates. He most likely trained under Sir Christopher Wren at some time or another. He was a wealthy man, making several sizeable donations to the society during his Fellowship.”
Jean took the astronomer, Lloyd Needham. “Needham studied geophysics and for a short time in the late 1600s he was hydrographer to William III. His letters and accounts chiefly concern themselves with related experiments and findings.”
Tayte sat forward again and read over his notes. “I was particularly interested in our mathematical statistician, the Reverend Charles Naismith. It appears that he was also something of a genealogist like me.”
“By Royal Appointment from 1702,” Dattani said.
“When Queen Anne came to the throne,” Jean added.
Tayte noted the connection. “Further interests in heraldic studies. Several letters concerning statistical analysis with a focus on infant mortality.”
“That set me wondering,” Jean said. “The study might have come about because of Anne’s problematic attempts to have children.”
“How problematic?”
“She went through eighteen terms of pregnancy. Miscarried several times and apart from one child, William, Duke of Gloucester who died aged eleven, all were either stillborn, died the same day or within a year or two of birth. It’s interesting, too, that her sister’s children shared the same fate. All three of Queen Mary’s babies were stillborn.”
Tayte was putting notes together as they spoke and he raised an eyebrow at hearing that, but he stuck to gathering the information for now. “And what did you make of our politician, William Daws?”
“Fascinating,” Jean said. “Politically he was Tory, in opposition to the then out of favour Whig party, although that all changed when Queen Anne died. That’s the first interesting thing.”
“The Screw Plot,” Tayte said. “You told us the Tories blamed the Whigs in an attempt to discredit them.”
Jean nodded. “So why would the Tory-supporting William Daws and the rest have been blamed for it? It doesn’t make sense.”
“No,” Tayte agreed, confirming his thoughts that for reasons as yet unknown, someone wanted these people dead. And what more discreet and seemingly lawful way was there than to let the hangman do it for them?
“As a field-physiologist,” Jean continued, “his main concerns were with public health, and perhaps most interestingly his letters detail a great deal of research into the study of human blood with a focus on proving parent and child relationships.”
That had caught Tayte’s attention, too. “Daws was on the right track, wasn’t he?” he said, thinking that it had taken science another two hundred years to make any worthwhile breakthrough in the field of blood-type analysis.
“I found it particularly intriguing,” Jean said, “because after the birth of James II’s son, the Old Pretender, Queen Mary, in a letter to Anne, claimed that the child was supposititious. She publicly charged that the boy was illegitimate, smuggled in via a bed-warming pan to replace the king’s stillborn baby. There was no proof of course.”
“Nullius in Verba,” Dattani said.
Tayte thought about that motto again. “So maybe Daws was looking for a way to prove it,” he said. “Or maybe it wasn’t about them at all but it got him thinking. His research could have been driven by the need to prove someone else’s bloodline.”
“Necessity being the mother of invention,” Dattani said.
“Exactly,” Tayte agreed. He moved on. “That just leaves Dr Bartholomew Hutton - our anagram man. He was an anatomist and as you said earlier, Rakesh, he was a royal physician. Not a bad artist either judging from the anatomical drawings I came across.”
Jean adjusted her glasses and checked through her notes. “Much of his focus seems to have been on the circulatory system.”
Dattani agreed. “I picked up from one letter that he was interested in the absorption of orally digested chemicals by the bloodstream.”
“Like how long it takes to lose a headache after popping a couple of Advil?” Tayte said.
“That sort of thing, yes.”
The room fell silent. Twenty seconds later, after putting together everything he’d read and heard, Tayte summed things up as he saw them.
“So, we’ve got connections to Queen Anne, either direct or via her sister, Mary II and her husband, William III. We have one of the men studying infant mortality and we can’t overlook the fact that Queen Anne went through eighteen terms of pregnancy, or that both Anne and Mary died without issue, leaving the throne of England in contention. We have a physician and anatomist looking into the circulatory system. And we have a physiologist looking for a way to prove parent and child relationships. I’m not sure where that fits and I don’t think we can draw any specific conclusions about our architect or astronomer just yet, but add in the probability that these men were hanged for something I don’t think any of us now believe they did and what have we got?”
Silence again.
Tayte couldn’t help but think that the motto to which these men adhered was both poignant and ironic. Nullius in Verba - Take no one’s word for it. Given the circumstances surrounding their deaths he wasn’t about to.
When at last someone stirred from their thoughts it was Jean and she sounded excited about something.
“What are your views on conspiracy theories?” she asked.
“No smoke without fire,” Tayte said. That was his motto and he was open to just about anything right now.
Jean got up. “Good,” she said. “Ther
e are some people we should go and see.”
Chapter Eight
Having thanked Rakesh Dattani for his help, Tayte and Jean left the Royal Society and headed back to the car, which Hues had parked at nearby Waterloo Place. It was a quiet area, not a major thoroughfare. The trees in the gardens opposite Carlton House Terrace outnumbered the people Tayte could see as he followed their long shadows, his briefcase heavy from all the printouts he’d collected.
“So who are we going to see?”
Jean smiled over her shoulder. “My best-kept secret,” she said, giving nothing away.
Twenty paces later, a sharp, chirp-chirp sound told Tayte that they had reached the car, and as everyone got in Jean’s phone rang. She checked the display, adopted a sour expression and took the call.
“Hello Daniel.”
Tayte understood why she was pulling faces when he recalled that Daniel was Jean’s ex-husband.
“Elliot?” Jean continued. “No, I haven’t. He didn’t show last night. I thought he must have changed his mind. You know what he’s like.”
There was a long pause. The car started up.
“The interview? Yes, of course I remember. No,” she added, shaking her head. “Okay, I’ll do that.”
The car pulled out of the parking bay and Jean ended the call. Her hands were shaking as she put the phone away and when she turned to Tayte he noticed that her face had lost a little colour.
“Christ,” she said. “I’d forgotten about Elliot.”
“What’s happened?”
“He had an interview this afternoon. Something his dad set up.”
“And he didn’t show?”
“No, and Daniel hasn’t been able to reach him.” She tensed suddenly and thumped the seat. “I should have called him last night. I should at least have found out where he was staying.” She thumped the seat again. Harder this time. “And I should have called him this morning and told him what had happened - told him not to go to the flat. Why didn’t I call him?”
“It’s been a distracting twenty-four hours,” Tayte said, trying to pacify her with what he thought was a reasonable defence.
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