Blood Royal (35 page)

“He didn’t just have a lot of guns, he had a collection valued at a king’s ransom.”

“And Keith Willard had something to do with that collection?”

“When most of us think of a woman grabbing her husband’s gun and ventilating him with it, the image of a weapon that was stored in a bedroom end table or closet comes to mind, perhaps even a desk in a home office. But the prince didn’t own a gun or even a bunch of guns, he had hundreds of them. Willard is—was—the prince’s armorer, the person who cared for the guns, cleaning them, repairing them, keeping them from rusting, whatever you do to guns. Most of the weapons are kept under lock and key in display cases.”

“The princess got the gun from Willard?”

“Indirectly. She got the key to the display case from him.”

It hit her, a revelation from hell. She saw it coming, but kept her features frozen. “I take it Willard has some recollection of when she checked the gun out.”

“He kept a log. She didn’t sign out the gun, but he saw her take it and noted it in the log.”

She nodded. Her throat was dry. “And?”

“The media briefing from Trent’s office says the princess got the gun three hours before the shooting, then drove to Cragthorpe and used it.”

“What does the log say?”

“She got it the day before. Twenty-seven hours before.”

Twenty-seven hours. Not even Slow Trigger James could sell a jury on a heat-of-passion defense in which the shooter got prepared the day before—then drove a couple hundred miles to pull the trigger.

It was one thing to spend years building up provocation, but another to plan the killing one day, sleep on it, and execute it the next day.

Especially after the world’s been told that she had gotten the gun a few hours before.

“It’s prejudicial misconduct of the most egregious nature,” Marlowe told the judge. “The prosecutor has sandbagged the defense every step of the way. This latest obstruction of justice denies the defendant the fundamental right to a fair trial. It was deliberate, malicious, prejudicial, and irreparable.”

She spoke calmly, with deliberation. The judge listened to her quietly. Trent and Hall had arrived in the room only seconds before. She had stormed the judge’s office and demanded he call in the prosecutor.

When she was finished, the judge said, “Mr. Desai?”

“As usual, Miss James makes accusations beyond the limits of sound legal precedent. It’s true that we did not reveal the armorer’s exact knowledge. However, that information was in the hands of the defense, wasn’t it? The princess knew how and when she got the gun—it’s not the fault of the prosecution if their client lied to them. We planned to use the evidence during rebuttal and would have notified the defense once that phase of the trial began.”

“Miss James?”

“The defendant doesn’t have a duty to reveal information. It’s the prosecution that has the burden of coming forth with evidence to prove the allegations—and to reveal that information to the defense. The duty of disclosure includes witnesses and physical evidence. The princess didn’t tell us about the armorer because she didn’t know he had observed her, if in fact he did, and didn’t know he made an entry in the log, if in fact he did.… As we know, it wouldn’t be the first time that evidence was tampered with in this case by the police.”

The judge flushed. “Miss James, I have tried to give you as much free rein as possible because you are not used to our legal system, but I will not permit a catty remark to be made that defames a Crown Prosecutor.”

“Judge, I did not make a
catty
remark and I find your statement that I did as being chauvinistic—I don’t think you would refer to a man’s comment in those terms. I spoke the truth, and once again you have come down on me. You have just heard that the prosecutor did not turn over critical evidence and earlier had tampered with a police report, you have been in the courtroom when the prosecutor made a prejudicial, inadmissible statement to the jury calling the defendant a child murderer, and I have yet to hear you sanction the prosecutor. What I do hear is continuous remarks on my character and I want that to stop. If you can’t handle this trial with an even hand, I suggest you disqualify yourself and let’s get another judge.”

The judge turned so purple he appeared on the verge of a coronary. She was certain he had stopped breathing. There was frozen silence in the room until Trent spoke.

“My lord, I apologize on behalf of the princess and her defense team. May we be excused?”

Without waiting for a response, Trent got up and she and Philip Hall followed him out.

“What exactly do you think you’re doing?” he demanded in the outer chamber.

“Something you’re not doing—defending the client. Why didn’t you know about the armorer?”

“We knew about the armorer, we knew about the log.”

“How did you—”

“We spoke to the armorer’s supervisor.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You never asked. You never bothered to tell us before you confronted the judge with it.”

“Desai thought he was sandbagging me, but it turns out that it was my cocounsels who were doing it. How did you plan to deal with the armorer’s testimony when he brought him on rebuttal?”

“We had prepared a legal argument to keep him out.”

“The judge won’t keep him out.”

“We understand that, but our duty is to make the argument, not guarantee results. You are deliberately antagonizing the judge. You have to go back in there and offer a sincere apology.”

She took a deep breath to calm her voice. “I understand that you have to live with the man after this trial and I don’t. I respect judges, but I also know when I’m being torpedoed by one. This one is out to sink me. I’m not going to apologize. You can offer your apologies and tell him for me that if he comes down on me again when he should be on the prosecutor’s back, I’m going to put his prejudicial conduct on the front pages of every paper in the country. And if I find out that you are withholding critical evidence from me, I’m going to put you next to him on the front pages.”

Trent gaped. “You—you’re insane.” He backed away from her, then fled back into the judge’s office, his silk robes flying.

Hall stared at her for a moment, started after Trent, and stopped when Marlowe called his name.

“Tell the judge I want an order for this armorer to appear in court tomorrow. He’s going to be the first witness I call.”

It was Hall’s turn to gape.
“What?”

“We have to, for damage control. We bring it out and make it part of our case, reshaping our defense. We can’t hide it, so we have to use it.”

“How do you plan to use it?”

“I don’t know yet, I need to talk to the princess. But I’m reminded of an expression they had in my hometown when I was a kid—if you’re being run out of town, get to the front of the mob and pretend it’s a parade.”

She gave a great sigh. “Let’s hope it doesn’t rain on our parade.”

*   *   *

A
STUFFED MANILA ENVELOPE
was waiting for Marlowe at the front desk when she got back to the hotel. She had asked Hall to have a background check done on Tony Dutton. Opening the envelope in her room, she found a series of articles from a newspaper morgue going back a dozen years. The note attached to the articles called them a “sampling” and indicated there were others available if she wanted more information.

Sergeant Kramer, who was impressed by Dutton’s virility, had been correct when she said he had been a prizewinning investigative reporter. During his time in “respectable journalism,” he had written exposés about the government, industry, and crime.

“A man after my own heart,” Marlowe murmured as she read articles in which he crusaded against injustices against women, minorities, and poor working stiffs. The last series of articles was a crime exposé before a two-year hiatus in reporting. After the break in writing, he began to crank out hack tabloid contributions.

She read the crime exposé first with growing interest and then horror.

It started with Dutton being offered a line of cocaine at a party. It gave him the idea to follow the “tracks” of the drug back as far as he could. He got the name of the small-time supplier who sold the cocaine to his host, and he was off and running. From the street supplier, who never bought more than a pound of cocaine at a time and sold it to consumers in grams and ounces, he followed the crooked road to the district “distributor,” who bought and sold kilos to a “wholesaler,” who dealt in hundred-kilo units. He kept digging until he followed the trail back to Liverpool, where a “bent copper,” which from the context Marlowe realized was a crooked cop, was providing cover for shipments that came into the port from ships sailing out of Colombia.

The investigation had taken Dutton a year. Along the way he met and began a romantic relationship with a woman in the Colombian embassy. She was a commercial attaché for her country and she fed him information on what ships she suspected were carrying contraband.

Dutton had been careful to disguise his source in his stories, but the dopers had also been smart: They stole his phone bill out of his mailbox. It had the calls made to the woman.

He received a message from her to meet her at her apartment. When he arrived, her door was slightly ajar. He pushed it open—and stood in shock.

The woman was tied up, with her mouth taped. She was sitting on five gallons of gasoline.

And pushing open the door ignited the fuse.

The explosion mercifully killed her.

Marlowe felt sick as she read the account of the murder. What beasts there were in this world. Her hands shook as she stuffed the articles back in the envelope.

She had picked up one more piece of information from the news accounts. Dutton had received burns on his legs and chest from the fire. The plastic surgeon who treated him was Walter Howler.

The prisoner of the Tower stood at a window and watched the Thames go by. She was melancholy and the deep, dark, slow waters did nothing to raise her spirits.

A message had arrived that her American lawyer was coming for another conference. She hated having to relive the past and dreaded that she might actually be called to testify. She had been told it was usually best that a defendant didn’t take the witness stand, that she would only be asked to testify if it was a last-ditch hope, but that was what her whole life had seemed to come down to, a last-ditch hope.

She thought about the tales of other princesses held prisoner in towers and the knights in shining armor who rescued them. The one that stuck with her was a story about a romantic rescue at the Tower of London.

It concerned the Earl of Nithsdale, a rebellious young Scottish nobleman who was captured in battle with the English and taken to the Tower to await execution with two other nobles in 1716. They were sentenced to death and scheduled to be executed in two weeks. When word of the execution sentence reached Nithsdale’s beautiful twenty-four-year-old wife in Scotland, the country had been covered with snow and travel in stagecoaches canceled. With no time to spare, the brave young woman road horseback nearly four hundred miles to London in brutal winter weather.

Arriving two days before the execution, she went straight to the king and threw herself at his feet, begging for the life of her husband. The poor king dragged her across the room with her hanging on to his long coat until his guards grabbed her. Swooning in the arms of the guards, she got thrown out of the palace rather than tossed in the dungeon.

She could not get into the Tower to see her husband without written permission. She lied to the guards, telling them that the king had promised a reprieve, and bribed them into letting her see her husband. Alone with her husband, she told him she would find a way to save him.

She took lodging in the city for her and her maid, and by the next day had come up with a plan, enlisting her maid, the landlady at the lodging, and a friend of the landlady into the plan.

With only hours to spare before the execution, she returned to the Tower with the three women. Lady Nithsdale again bribed the guards, but was only allowed to bring in one lady at a time. She took in the landlady’s friend first, a woman named Mrs. Hilton. Inside the room, Mrs. Hilton took off extra woman’s clothing she had brought for the earl. Lady Nithsdale escorted Mrs. Hilton and brought back Mrs. Mills, her landlady. Using a wig for her husband’s hair, and makeup for his dark eyebrows, she rouged his cheeks to hide the stubbles of his beard.

She then escorted her husband out, with him dressed as a woman and holding a handkerchief in front of his face to hide weeping. Seeing him to the Tower gates, she returned to his room and pretended to carry on a conversation with him in the room to give him a chance to get away.

Her husband escaped out of the city while his two codefendants were being executed. She joined him later in Italy.

The princess had never heard the reason why Lady Nithsdale was never punished for her crime, but she imagined that her romantic daring brought admiration rather than scorn from the men of the era.

The Nithsdales lived a long life together in Italy … happily ever after.

Lord Nithsdale was lucky, the princess thought. He had a woman who loved him more than life itself.

What sort of feeling was love that burned as bright as life itself?

What kind of courage and imagination did it take to escape from a life that you hated?

To run off to Italy and live happily ever after with the man you loved?

“Why did you take the gun from your husband’s collection a full day before you used it?” Marlowe asked.

The princess shook her head. “There are things that can’t be explained.”

Marlowe paced in the Tower room, her adrenaline high.

“That answer won’t do. When they have you under the microscope—and that’s what’s happening, not just the jury but the whole world is watching this trial—you have to fill in all the blanks. We can’t leave anything unanswered—if we do, the prosecution will provide a conclusion we don’t want. I’m not even sure the judge will permit us to argue heat of passion when you got the gun the day before. You have to tell me the truth.”