The Last Queen of England (10 page)

Tayte hovered a finger over the words, ‘
Royal Society’
.
 
That had to be what Marcus had drawn from this record.
 
He scanned the remainder of the text and found nothing of further interest - nothing concerning any of the other hanged men and nothing more for Dr Bartholomew Hutton.
 
He got up and Jean followed, prompting Hampshire and Hues to stir into life.
 
They paced towards the exit with them, one in front and one behind.

Once outside the room Tayte approached a member of staff.
 
“Is there somewhere I can get access to the Internet?”

The girl smiled and pointed.
 
“Computer facilities are provided in the Open Reading Room on this floor,” she said.
 
“It’s the first reading room you came to on your way in.”

Tayte thanked the girl and when they arrived in the Open Reading Room he stood and turned in a slow circle while he looked for an available workstation.
 
It was already a busy area.
 
He thought he would have to go down to the Foyer and get his laptop from his briefcase but Hampshire and Hues were on the case.
 
Hues leant in over the keyboard nearest them and flashed something at the man sitting there: a badge, Tayte supposed.
 
He saw a few calm words being mouthed and a second later the man got up and left.

“I guess that’s all part of the service,” Tayte said to Jean as he sauntered over.

They sat down and Tayte brought up the website for the Royal Society.
 
“It has to be the connection,” he said.
 
“The five men were hanged together for the same alleged offence.
 
It stands to reason they knew each other.”

“Maybe they have a list?” Jean said.

“That’s what I’m hoping.”

From the website’s homepage Tayte navigated through ‘Fellows’ to the ‘History Pages’.
 
At the bottom of that page he saw a link inviting him to ‘Search our database of Fellows’.
 
He clicked it and began the search, first with Charles Naismith.
 
Two minutes later they were both smiling.
 
All five men were there.

“Touchdown,”
Tayte said.
 
Technology had its advantages, too.

Each entry had a mini Curriculum Vitae appended to it: a résumé of information such as where the subject was born, their professions and their fields of research, their key activities and their published works.
 
Tayte sent copies to the print queue and when he returned with them he lined them up on the desk.

“Somewhere in here we should find our next direction,” he said.
 

They leant in on their elbows and began to correlate the data.
 
The five Fellows had all lived in London at the time of their enrolment into the society.
 
They had addresses from Bayswater in the east through Clerkenwell to Whitechapel, but Tayte thought there had to be something else that connected them apart from the fact that they were all hanged on the same day.
 
After a long and silent ten minutes Jean sat back, took her glasses off and pinched her eyes.

“It would help if we knew what we were looking for,” she said.
 
“The only useful connection I can see is the society itself.”

Tayte was coming to the same conclusion.
 
The professions of the five Fellows all varied: one was a member of the clergy, another a physician.
 
There was an astronomer, an ex-soldier and a politician.
 
They seemed an eclectic bunch.
 
Even their fields of research seemed entirely disparate: mathematical statistics in the case of the Reverend Naismith, anatomy for Dr Hutton, geophysics and hydrography for Lloyd Needham, architecture for the ex-soldier, Sir Stephen Henley, and field physiology for William Daws.
 
Mathematics of one discipline or another was common to three out of five but being the language of science Tayte figured that was to be expected.

“What would Marcus have drawn from all this?” he said, thinking aloud.
 
“What direction did it give him?”
 

“I don’t see how he could have made any further connection,” Jean said.

Tayte thought about that.

“You’re right.
 
So Marcus would have concluded that he needed more information.
 
The connection for now must simply be that they knew each other through the Royal Society.

“We’re overcomplicating things,” Jean said.

Tayte nodded.
 
“I think we’ve found all we’re going to find here.”
 
He grabbed the mouse and scrolled to the bottom of the screen.
 
“It’s time to move on,” he added as he scribbled the address for the Royal Society into his notebook.
 
“Marcus would have wanted to find out more about these men and so must we.”

DI Jack Fable spent the morning in a briefing at New Scotland Yard.
 
Apart from a few MI5 heads, the cinema-like room was half filled with representatives from a cross section of Metropolitan Police units: a hundred people give or take, who were largely from Royalty Protection Branch, Counter Terrorism Command, Firearms and the Territorial Support Group.
 
It had been an awareness briefing.
 
That’s about all it could have been given how little they had to go on.
 
A likely but as yet unspecified threat to national security that may or may not have a treasonable, thus royal connection.

Fable couldn’t wait to get out of there, have a smoke and get back to the job.
 
Two and a half hours without a cigarette made his hands shake.
 
He lit another and headed back inside the building, adopting the slow, familiar pace he knew would see it finished by the time he reached the door.
 
He was still thinking about the brief and how Chief Inspector Graham Tanner had stepped in as soon as he’d heard that the Security Service were involved and the case had become high profile.
 
Fable had to listen to Tanner as he took the questions he should have been answering, fielding them in the vague manner of a seasoned politician because the man knew even less than the rest of them.

There was a Royalty Protection supervisor Fable couldn’t quite shake from his head, too.
 
Maybe it was his severe crew cut or his towering height that made him stand out.
 
Or perhaps it was because of the questions he’d asked.
 
They had been all the right questions, like did they have any idea where the threat was likely to come from?
 
What form would it take?
 
Do they have any suspects at this time?
 
Fable didn’t know the man but he disliked him just for being the one to remind him so publicly that he didn’t know a damn thing about whoever had killed Julian Davenport or Marcus Brown, any more than he knew why.

But Fable was resolved to change that.

It was almost two p.m. by the time he got back to his office.
 
Before he’d gone into the briefing he’d called in the details on Douglas Jones who, along with Julian Davenport, was the subject of Marcus Brown’s genealogy charts.
 
Jones had been dead twenty years, having died at an indicated age of thirty-four.
 
He was a young man and Fable wanted to know how he died.
 
He’d expected to find a lone coroner’s report waiting for him: something simple with a straightforward cause of death, like an accident or an illness of some kind.
 
But the pile of information on his desk made him think again.
 
Such causes of death never generated this much paperwork.
 
This was something else entirely.

In another part of London a man stirred from sleep.
 
He was a night person who liked to be active when it was dark outside and quiet.
 
Nighttime was usually when he worked but sometimes you had to go with the flow and for him these were exceptional times.
 
The high-pitched beeps that had woken him sounded again and he sat to attention, throwing back the bedcovers, revealing a muscular torso that tensed and rippled as he moved.
 
He grabbed the mobile phone from his bedside table and silenced it.
 
This was not a phone to be switched off or ignored, even for sleep.
 
He read the text message.
 
That was how it worked.
 
Strictly no voice calls.

‘Be ready.’

That was all it said - all it needed to say.
 
He smiled to himself as he deleted it.
 
Another chance was coming, that was the thing.
 
And that was all he wanted to know.
 
He leant across to the bedside table again and reached into the drawer, retrieving a Browning semi-automatic pistol.
 
He checked the clip.
 
It was full.
 
Thirteen standard NATO 9mm rounds - the ‘Hi-Power’ as used by armed forces around the world in over fifty countries.
 
It was a common handgun.
 
The serial numbers filed off.
 
Origin untraceable.

 
He got out of bed, eyed the grey suit on the back of the door and walked naked to the bathroom, flexing and stretching, thinking that this time he would be more than ready.
 
He’d failed to kill the historian twice now and that pissed him off.
 
But he hadn’t expected there to be anyone else.

Chapter Seven

T
ayte and Jean were outside the premises of the Royal Society of London: a Grade 1 listed building located at Carlton House Terrace between Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square.
 
They were standing with Security Service officer Hampshire in the early afternoon sun beneath the pillared monument of Frederick Augustus, the grand old Duke of York, which, along with the pedestrian walkway that led down to The Mall and St James’s Park, divided the terrace into two Corinthian-columned blocks.
 
Officer Hues had insisted on going in first, which was a little melodramatic to Tayte’s mind, but what did he know?
 
Hues wasn’t gone long.

Once inside the building they headed across a marble floor to the information desk.
 
The foyer was busy with tourists and there was no one waiting to meet them this time.
 
It would have taken too long to arrange and Tayte figured the Security Service badges would get them access to whatever they needed to see.
 
He wasn’t wrong.
 
After the introductions and a brief explanation of their purpose, they were following a member of staff to the society library, easing their way past the throng of sightseers who, according to the noticeboard, were waiting to take in one of the society’s lectures.
 
The eager-looking man who had been appointed to them for the duration of their visit was called Rakesh Dattani.
 
He was a slim man in an olive-green suit with a white shirt open at the neck.

“The society was formed by twelve men in 1660,” Dattani said as they walked, his voice conveying the elocution of a fine public school education.
 
“It was after one of Sir Christopher Wren’s lectures at Gresham College.
 
Their purpose was to promote natural philosophy or ‘science’ as we call it today.”

“From the Latin,
scientia,
” Jean said.
 
“Knowledge.”

“A Latin scholar?”

“Once upon a time.
 
It sort of goes with the job.
 
I’m a historian.”

Latin was one of Tayte’s weakest subjects at college and he’d done little since then to improve his understanding.
 
“I saw something written in Latin on the way in.”

“
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.”