Blood Royal

by Harold Robbins

  Marlowe squinted at the car parked in front of the main entrance. “How do you know? There’s no markings on it.”

  “It’s in the no-parking fire zone. There’s a security guard at a desk right inside the front door. See him?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’d make the driver move it if it wasn’t a coppers’ car. I’ll be just around the corner to the right. When you create the diversion, I’ll walk in.”

  Marlowe was ready to bite her fingernails. “I don’t like this. We could get arrested.”

  He patted her knee. “Not to worry, luv, I’m here to protect you.”

  “That’s what’s got me most worried.”

  He got out of the car and made his way through the dark parking lot to the side of the building. When he got to the corner of the building, he waved.

  She started the car and took a deep breath. “Why me, Lord, why didn’t I stay in Modesto and be a farmer’s wife?”

  She let up on the clutch and the car jerked, jumped, and shimmied to a stop. “Damn.” The best-laid plan had a flaw—her American driving skills in a British car. She had to sit on the wrong side, to steer from the wrong side, which was doable without practice because she was in a parking lot, but she was used to driving an automatic transmission. The car had a typical center-mounted stick shift. She had to use her left hand to shift gears and her left foot on the clutch while keeping her right foot on the gas and somewhere along the line have a foot for the brake.

  She got the car moving across the parking lot. “An accident waiting to happen,” she said aloud. That fit in nicely with the plan.

  When her car was near the front entrance, she stopped. Trying to force the gearshift into reverse caused a grinding that made her nerves raw. She saw the security guard inside the door look up at the sound. He got up and came around his desk to look out. The gear suddenly went into reverse and she popped the clutch. The car lurched back, hitting the side door of the police car with a bang.

  That was the plan, but it didn’t include making enough noise to wake the dead.

  She put her head down on the steering wheel. “Jesus.”

  The security officer hurried up to her open window. “You okay?”

  “Yes, uh, I messed up. Can you find the car’s owner?”

  “Bad luck for you, it’s a copper’s car. Don’t go anywhere.” He started back inside, but spun around and came back and wrote down the license plate number. He smiled and waved his notebook at her and disappeared back inside.

  She stuck her head out the window and got a look at Dutton at the corner of the building. He made a gesture, it looked like he gave her the finger, but it was too dark to see and she concluded he probably gave her an “OK” sign.

  She got out the driver’s license Dutton had prepared for her. “A real license,” he had told her, “except that the picture belongs to the woman who owns the car. If they check, it’s all up and up.” She resisted the temptation to add up the number of crimes she was committing or was an accessory to. She knew she had passed the grounds for disbarment.

  When the security guard returned with a man hurrying toward her, Dutton started for the front doors.

  * * *

  DUTTON NODDED AND FLASHED his RPS ID card at the woman on the phone behind the reception desk as he headed for the elevator. “Going up,” he said.

  She put her hand over the phone receiver. “What’s happening outside?”

  “Woman backed into one of our cars.”

  He took the elevator to the fourth floor and flashed his ID at the nurses’ station.

  “Here for Mr. Smith, are you? Haven’t seen you before. What happened to McKinzie?”

  “Be back up, little fender bender with the car.”

  Howler was held in a room at the end of the corridor. A comfy chair, TV, and table with coffee and magazines was set out in front of it for the Royal Protection officer on duty. He had assured Marlowe that there would be only one on duty at a time, but had held his breath until he confirmed it.

  He opened the door and walked in. Walter Howler, aka John Smith, was on the bed in the room, wide wake, watching the telly.

  “Hello, How-ee, how the bleedin’ hell are you?”

  Howler stared at him. “Do I know you?”

  “Off your medicine? Don’t recognize your old pal, the one you set up for that chamber of horrors you created at the Abbey?”

  He squinted at Dutton. “You’re that arse of a reporter.”

  Dutton moved next to the bed. “I’m your savior, your old school pal come to make you healthy and wealthy.”

  “Fuck you, you ain’t got nothing I want, you don’t have a pot to piss in. I’m selling my story for millions.”

  “And who do you plan to sell it to? Those coppers who have you imprisoned here? I can get you out of here and see that you have a villa on the Costa del Sol—”

  Howler laughed hysterically. “A piece of shit like that? You measly little man, I’m going to have a palace, not a house.” He got off the bed and stood up, still bending over laughing. “The prince is going to pay me ten million pounds, that’s my demand, ten million—and maybe a baronage or an earldom, too, take it from his estates in Cornwall.”

  “For a letter that says what?”

  Howler blinked at him. “Letter?”

  “The letter, you have the princess’s letter, the one in which she says her husband’s going to do her in.”

  Howler stared at him wild-eyed. “Bing-bing, wrong answer, bing-bing, wrong answer. You lose, you lose.”

  “What are you talking about?” Dutton grabbed him by the front of his hospital pajamas. “What do you know about the killing?”

  “I sent a letter, but I’m not going to tell you about it, it’s under the rose, you have to look under the rose. Here.” He kneed Dutton in the groin. The blow didn’t connect well, but it made Dutton let go of Howler’s collar and go off balance. Howler gave him a shove that knocked him off his feet and flew out of the room.

  Dutton scrambled to his feet and raced after him. As Dutton came out the door, Howler was running down the corridor, flying by the nurses’ station. “Stop him!” she yelled. Dutton went by her as Howler ran past a door marked STAIRWAY and into a room. Dutton heard the door lock as he got to it.

  “He’s locked it,” Dutton told the nurse. “But at least he didn’t get away.”

  “He doesn’t want to get away, that’s where the drugs are kept.”

  She banged on the door. “Open this door immediately, Mr. Smith! Open it right now!”

  Dutton heard the elevator chime that it had reached the fourth floor. Without waiting to see if it contained an RPS officer, he ducked through the door marked STAIRWAY.

  60

  They were in the car on their way out of the parking lot when Marlowe looked back. “Someone’s out on a ledge.”

  Dutton slammed on the brakes and stuck his head out the window. A male figure in white pajamas had climbed out a fourth-floor window. “It’s Howler.”

  With his back to the building, the man scooted sideways along the ledge. Another man, the RPS duty officer, stuck his head and shoulders out the window. He reached over for Howler’s pants leg. And Howler stepped off the ledge.

  “Oh, my God!” Marlowe cried.

  Dutton got the car moving. “We’ll go to York and leave the car at a car park, I’ll arrange to have it driven back later. We can take the train back to London.”

  “That man, he has to be dead.”

  Dutton shrugged. “Best thing that ever happened to him. His mind was dead long ago.”

  “We’re in trouble—”

  “Not a bit of it,” Dutton said. “You’ve been a lawyer too long. We haven’t violated any laws. Howler was being held illegally by the Royals, kidnapped and imprisoned. They’re probably happy he’s out of the way. They certainly aren’t going to place charges against us, are they? What did we do? Visited an old friend in hospital, that’s the only thing we did.”

  �
�I—”

  “Just relax, luv. You’re used to dealing with laws and courts and everything by the book. The world doesn’t run that way, does it? Howler was a death waiting to happen, he was a miserable bastard who mutilated people he operated on while under drugs and tried to sell one of his own kids for a hit. He brought his death on himself and the world’s better without him.”

  “You’re right,” she said, “and now I can go home, way back home, back to Modesto and see if there’s still a Denny’s in town that’s hiring waitresses.”

  “There you go again, Miss Pessimistic, with you the glass isn’t just only half empty, it’s strychnine, not water. You’re a world-famous lawyer.”

  “I got fired.”

  “What does that matter? How many world-famous lawyers can you think of who actually won a case? It’s not whether you win or lose anymore, you have celebrity status.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  They were on the train on their way back to London before Marlowe asked about Howler. “When you got into the car, you said it was all a fiasco, that he wouldn’t tell you about the letter. What exactly did he tell you?”

  “He said the only letter was the one he sent, that he was demanding ten million pounds and for the prince to make him a Cornish noble.”

  “What prince?”

  “The one your client killed. He didn’t name him, but mentioned estates in Cornwall. The Prince of Wales is also the Duke of Cornwall and gets a big chunk of his income from there.”

  “It makes no sense.”

  “Sure it does. When your brain’s been fried, things look different.”

  “Didn’t he say anything else? Nothing about the princess’s letter?”

  “Nothing about it. When I asked him about the letter he sent, he said you had to look under the rose.”

  “Under the rose? What’d he mean?”

  “It’s a phrase from Roman times, maybe earlier. In ancient times they put roses on the ceilings of dining rooms to remind guests that anything said under the influence of wine was confidential. ‘Under the rose’ came to mean it was a secret. I think old Henry VIII used the phrase, too. They used to hang a rose over a discussion they wanted kept secret.”

  “None of this is computing,” Marlowe said.

  “You have to have a scrambled brain for it all to make sense. It made perfect sense to Howler.”

  61

  Tower of London

  As she cut off strands of her hair, the princess thought about her marriage. “No chance at all,” she told the mirror. Neither one of them—the man who would be king or the bride he chose—had had a chance to make a go of it. A thousand years of ingrained traditions had doomed their romance and turned their marriage into a quagmire of recriminations.

  She stared at her reflection in the mirror and wondered how she could have done the strange things that happened in her marriage. Like throwing herself down the stairs just months after the honeymoon, while she was pregnant. “Did you really do that?” she asked her reflection.

  It had been an act of desperation. She had felt abandoned and betrayed—and useless. As time went on, the hurt had turned to hate.

  She chopped off more hair. She was bringing it down to about an inch, all the way around. Her hairdresser would be driven mad if she saw what a mess she made of giving herself a haircut.

  She had been the spoiler, the nonstarter who upset things. She had emotions and imagination, two things that had been bred out of the Royals. As she sat in front of the mirror and chopped off more hair, she understood why the Royals had been lobotomized emotionally. There was no room for tears or fears, for strong emotions like love and hate in their world. There was duty, honor, country.

  If she had understood that she was entering into an institution instead of a romance, would she have fled before a Cinderella coach arrived to carry her to St. Paul’s and the wedding of the century?

  An honest appraisal of the situation would have made history different. Instead, she had entered into a cold marriage. And her husband made a cruel mistake by not recognizing her needs, isolating her instead and letting her paranoia run rampant.…

  But he was even more a Prisoner of Wales than she was. He had been born into it and had never known anything different.

  Her maid knocked on her door. She had it locked from the inside. She answered without opening it. “Yes?”

  “Your sons are here, ma’am.”

  “I’ll be with them in a moment. You may leave now. I don’t need you for the rest of the day.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  When she came out a few minutes later, her two sons got out of their chairs and hugged her. The younger one said, “Mum, you look funny with your hair so short.”

  His older brother shook his head. “Bad cut, looks like you put a bowl over your head and trimmed around it.”

  “Fine, then you two hair critics can finish cutting it for me. Did you bring the things I asked for?”

  The older boy nodded. “Under our clothes.”

  “You know why I have to do this, don’t you?”

  They both nodded.

  Tears welled inside her. She hugged both of them. “You know I love you both, don’t you?”

  * * *

  IT WAS EARLY EVENING when the governor of the Tower entered the princess’s quarters. Not all of the expense of housing the princess in the Tower was being borne by the government. He had invoices to be signed for personal items that would be presented to her accounting firm for payment.

  He was surprised to find her older son in the living room reading a book. The boy, a handsome young man, would soon officially be installed as Prince of Wales and would someday be king. Fortunately, he had gotten his looks from his mother and thus avoided the ears his father was famous for possessing.

  “I didn’t expect to see you here, young man. I was told you and your brother left earlier.”

  “No, sir, as you can see, I am still here.”

  “Well, I suppose we can bend the rules we’ve set up for your mother’s visitors this once. Where is the princess?”

  “You mean my mum?”

  “Well, I don’t know of any other princess that resides here in the Tower, do you?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Well, please call her for me.”

  “I can’t do that, sir.”

  “And why can’t you do that? Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes, sir, but I still can’t call my mum.” The boy put aside his book and stared at the man gravely.

  The governor frowned. Future king or not, the young man was being impertinent.

  “Perhaps you would like to tell me why you won’t call her?”

  The boy set aside his book, stood up, and faced the Tower governor.

  “I’m afraid I can’t, sir. My mum’s escaped.”

  62

  Marlowe and Dutton sat in bed in Dutton’s apartment and watched the stunning news about the princess’s escape. She had left the Tower in the company of her younger son—and dressed in the clothes of her older boy, who was about the same height as her.

  The boys had smuggled in clothes for the older brother to dress in after he gave up the ones the guards had seen him wear for his visit with his mother.

  Dutton left the bed for a few moments and came back with two glasses of beer. “Called my editor,” he said. “They’ll be running a story in the morning that an unnamed source had witnessed the princess being beamed up to an alien spaceship.”

  Marlowe choked on her beer. “Who came up with that nonsense?”

  Dutton shrugged and grinned modestly. “I did. Great times bring out the best in my writing.”

  “He’s not dead,” Marlowe said.

  “Of course he’s not. She’s disappeared, but her younger son arrived safely home by taxi. Both boys deny knowing where their mum’s flown off to.”

  “I’m talking about their father.”

  He stared at her. “You’ve got yo
ur own inside scoop on alien abduction, do you?”

  “He’s not dead. That’s the secret under the rose.”

  He took a long sip of beer and stared at the telly. He clicked it off and turned to her. “All right, luv, spill it.”

  “Howler’s letter was a blackmail letter to the prince. You said to think like Howler, didn’t you? You always said Howler was smart crazy, not crazy crazy. And he had magic hands at bringing life back to dead bodies. A body reconstructionist, you said.”

  “He was a wizard at plastic surgery, with flesh or wax, that I give you.”

  “That’s what the message was all about. Those body parts you found at the Abbey, those are the leftovers.”

  “Leftovers from what?”

  “From creating a body to be buried as the Prince of Wales.”

  “You’re crazy. Damp old England has made mold grow in your brain.”

  “Don’t you see? You were right when you said it was a message, you just had the wrong message. He re-created the Abbey horror just to show the prince that he was going to expose him. When you talked to him, he kept referring to the prince as being alive, kept thinking that he’d blackmail him. Well, guess what, he is blackmailing him, or trying to.”

  “You’re telling me that you think the Royals hired Howler to make a dummy body to be buried? What about the real body?”

  “I don’t think it was the Royals who hired Howler, not the queen for sure. There was no real body. You know what really did it for me? I suddenly realized that in this homicide investigation, the coroner’s office had not taken pictures of the prince’s body in a way that made him identifiable. The pictures turned over to me from the coroner’s office didn’t show his face.”

  “I’m still not getting it.”

  “I’m just getting it. I think I know what has bothered me the most about the princess—she was truly a nice person. There simply wasn’t the malice in her that permits one to kill. To the contrary, in the past, she turned the violence on herself. Even abused women usually don’t attempt to hurt themselves repeatedly before they finally blow and kill their husbands.

  “What I’m seeing is a plot, not by the queen or the government, but by two star-crossed lovers who found themselves in a terrible situation—a bad marriage and the whole world spying on them, paparazzi watching their every move, driving them crazy, constantly embarrassing them. What if these two just sat down one day and said the hell with it, let’s get out of this? What if they decided one day that what they really wanted to do with their lives is be normal, be able to walk into a store and buy a pair of socks without causing a sensation? These people have vast amounts of money and friends around the world. It wouldn’t be hard for them to do a vanishing act.”