Blood Royal (41 page)

“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.”

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?”

*   *   *

I
T 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.”

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 your 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.”

“I don’t know—”

“Yes, you do, I hear it in your voice. The prince has powerful friends who could set the whole thing up and make sure the local authorities don’t look too closely into the shooting. The gun she shoots him with is loaded with a blank instead of a real bullet. One of his close friends is his doctor, he was there and was the person who had the prince removed to inside the palace. They would have arranged at an earlier time for Howler to create a look-alike from spare body parts. Hell, with ears like the Prince of Wales had, it wouldn’t be hard to fool a casual onlooker. And there wouldn’t be that many casual onlookers because you’re talking about a man and his close intimates who have enormous power and influence. They can dictate exactly who gets to see the body, even during a police investigation.

“The one flaw was Howler. They needed him, but he was uncontrollable. The Royal Protection officers guarding him may be in on the plot, or the government has stumbled on to it and is working to cover it up, to do damage control.”

“My God, this is better than my alien abduction story.”

“Don’t you dare try to get it printed—I’ll hound you to the grave if you do. You know, I really do like her. I’m just beginning to realize how much I have in common with her. Neither of us cared for school or did well at it, we’re both essentially high school dropouts whose first job was babysitting. We came out of dysfunctional families, ruled by dominant fathers. But in our own ways, we both became a success. She had little education, but she had love for people, especially for the underdog, and the whole world recognized it. And hell, she wasn’t that overboard in the romance department. There aren’t many women on this planet who haven’t dreamt of Prince Charming sweeping them off their feet and riding off into the sunset.

“I’ve never met the prince, but I’ve come to have a lot of empathy for him even if he was born in a palace. In a strange way, she was right when she said, I was lucky to have been born poor. But she needed to add a caveat—I was lucky to have been born poor and had the good fortune to have wanted to better myself and the luck and drive to make it. They never had a chance. I started at the bottom and reached for the sky, they started at the top and had nowhere to go but down. Even my marriage was different than hers. I got into a bad marriage, but at least I never fooled myself into thinking that it was a fairy tale.”

“That’s the mistake, isn’t it? Fairy tales usually are horror stories.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you ever read Cinderella? Not the modern children’s-book version or the Hollywood version, but the original tale?”

“I don’t know, I read whatever small children read, or maybe it was a Walt Disney movie I remember.”

“Then you’re in for a surprise if you read the original fairy tale, because it’s a real horror story. You know the business about Cinderella leaving her glass slipper at the ball and the prince coming to her house to see if it fits any of the girls? Well, the two stepsisters were members of a dysfunctional family—they had a mother that belonged with Howler, locked up in a ward for the criminally insane.

“When the prince gave the first stepsister the slipper to try on, the mother took her into another room. The girl’s foot was too long, so they cut off the girl’s big toe so her foot would slip into it. Seeing the girl’s foot in the shoe, the prince thought she was the girl he’d danced with at the ball. But as he rode away with her on his horse, he saw blood dripping from the shoe and caught on to the fact her toe had been hacked off.”

“My God, that’s horrible.”

“Gets worse. He brings that sister back to the house and gives the slipper for the other stepsister to try on. The mother takes her into the other room to fit it and it turns out that she couldn’t get her heel into it.”