The Prince and I: A Romantic Mystery (The Royal Biography Cozy Mystery Series Book 1) (8 page)

The next morning, I am still full of confusion. Did the thought of me in the tub gross out the Prince? Is that why he immediately ended the call? Or is it just considered very rude by the upper crust in Britain that a person would take a call from their bathtub?

It doesn’t matter. In the future, I need to be more professional. I need to remember this is not about me and my fantasy love life. This is a job. I putter around the kitchen in my robe and make myself toast and tea. Then I sit down to work. I give myself the goal of finishing writing up the first three years of the Prince’s life, based on the pictures, descriptions and newspaper articles I have received from the Palace.

I type all morning long. Around half past eleven, the rain sets in and it starts to turn foggy outside. I decide to take my rental car, which must be costing Meg a fortune, and find a greengrocers. I drive a block to the town information center where a very kind lady in a tasteful black suit gives me a map, and delineates the route I need with a fat green marker.

An hour later, I return home, with enough groceries to feed all of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army of ill-fated highlanders. I don’t return to work. Instead, I pull down Sean’s file marked Croesus and sit down on the sofa in my living room.

My hand shakes as I stare at the folder. I feel like I am entering my ex’s dark world of secrets. Who knows what I might find? I open the cover tentatively. The first few pages in the file is an introduction to Croesus that would bore even the most history-thirsty Singaporean.

Croesus was the King of Lydia from 560 to 547 B.C. until his defeat by Cyrus the Great.

Hmm, I snicker, Sean used “was” in the very first sentence, what a boring verb. I’m sure every college student reading this would have immediately fallen asleep in a pool of their own drool.

I read on and remember to be respectful of the dead. After establishing who Croesus was, Sean immediately dives into the King’s lost treasure. This part is much more interesting. He’s written what I already know, namely that King Croesus was king of Lydia, which was the wealthiest country of its time. And the search for the King’s treasure has been stranger than fiction. About one hundred years ago, a huge fortune in treasure was found by tomb raiders in the tumuli outside Sardis. That treasure sparked an international feud when the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought it illegally and then mislabeled it, either knowingly or unknowingly, so that for a long time the Lydian Horde, as it was known, was effectively lost. Then one day, a Turkish reporter got a whiff that the Met may have purchased the treasure illegally. He went strolling through the museum until guess what he saw? The Lydian horde proudly on display under the title of “East Greek Treasures.”

There ensued a huge legal battle between the Turks and the Met. When the Turks won their treasure back, they built a museum in a tiny town outside Sardis. Fast forward one-hundred years and Tamara Bank’s team, using ultrasound and other advances in technology, locates a perfectly intact tomb chock-a-block full of coins and jewelry, pottery and objets d’arte. A tomb that may have belonged to a queen of Lydia, perhaps to Croesus’ wife herself. Like a shark smelling blood, Schnellings believed the time was right for a new biography of Croesus. They sent Sean and me to do research. They sent us to Sardis, where we got down and dirty and helped with Tamara’s excavations.

I flip to the next pages in the file. More facts about Croesus. I skip them and flip the page over. Then I gasp.

The next item in the folder is a picture of me and Sean together, arms around each other, at the Sardis dig site. Disturbingly, someone has cut my head out of the photo with a pair of scissors.

It immediately dawns on me how alone I am here in the Cotswolds, not knowing a single person.

I flip the photo over and read a very chilling message. “You’re better off without her” is scrawled across the top and the whole thing is signed, “Love, E.”

Who the heck is E.?

I sit still, feeling spooked and staring at the rain and fog out the window. A few minutes later, I return to flipping through the file. My jaw drops with each picture. There are photos of over one hundred different archeological objects in this file. Objects I don’t remember seeing when we were at the site. There are photos of golden urns with elaborate carvings, tiny broaches in the shapes of animals, and early gold coins with Croesus’ head stamped on them.

Still, these pictures shouldn’t really be all that shocking. It’s not a strange thing for someone working on a biography of King Croesus to have pictures of newly found archeological objects that shed light on what was happening during his reign. Yet the way the pictures are photographed disturbs me. It’s as if it was all done hastily, by someone using a cell phone.

My mind goes one step furthe
r
—
were these pictures snapped quickly and then sent to a third part
y
—
someone who deals in illegal antiquity sales? Could Sean and Tamara have been in cahoots? That would explain his ability to pay for this new cottage. Selling even a fraction of the pictured archeological items would pay for the walls that currently surround me.

I turn to the last picture in the file and gasp again. There’s a picture of a glorious wreath made up of hundreds of tiny gold flowers. That’s what Tatum’s creepy neighbor in 4B reported that Tamara dropped in the hall way outside Sean’s apartment. But what is this doing in a file marked Sardis? This crown appears to be a classic Macedonian funeral wreath. They are very rare and worth millions of dollars. And they are not connected to Croesus in any way.

I lean into the sofa.  “Sean, Sean,” I mumble to myself, “If you did what I think you did, then I never really knew you at all.”

Sipping another pint of ale at the bar that evening, I think the logical thing to do would be to call Tamara Banks and clear up this whole mess. Quite obviously, I have jumped to conclusions.

I should also call Detective Puyn at the NYPD and tell him about Sean’s files here in Bourton. As it is, I could be tampering with evidence.

I run a hand through my hair in frustration. It’s all such a mess that I sit at the bar long after I have finished my drink. I need to get moving though. I need to make it an early night. Tomorrow I will be heading back to London. I rang up Alistair and he has agreed to show me the nursery in Kensington Palace, where Prince Alex spent much of his youth.

“You are welcome to see it, as long as you don’t describe it in too much detail. You mustn’t write exactly where it is located inside the Palace, as that could be a security risk for the royal family,” he explained. I agreed with him wholeheartedly and rang off.

After being chatted up by a large, balding man with horrible teeth for thirty minutes, I walk home from the pub in the chilly night air. I enter my cottage around back, walking through the garden and inserting my key in the conservatory door. Somewhere in the night, a dog gives an angry bark and I jump. A second later, I scoot through the door returning to the tranquility of my living room.

For some reason, I feel spooked. The hair on the back of my neck rises. I feel as if I’m being watched. As I switch on the lights to the stairway, I catch a glimpse of something moving, outside in the garden.

My heart stops. A figure with a dark hood strides comfortably passed the rear window, not the least bit concerned at being seen.

My mind reels. Someone is in my garden. What should I do? Should I call 999? Or should I fling open the front door and run for it.

A second later I hear a jiggling of the back door. I decide to run for it. I grab my cell phone out of my bag and race for the front door.

My feet fly as I head up High Street, dialing and shouting for help. In my panic, I run smack into that same large, balding man who was chatting me up at the pub.

“Help, help,” I scream, “Burglarin my house!” I point in alarm at the front door of my cottage which is flung wide open.  For whatever reaso
n
—
a misguided sense of chivalry, perhap
s
—
the fat man shouts, “A burglar in our town?” and takes off towards my cottage like a hound after a fox.

Not me. I continue up the street, screaming at the top of lungs, watching as lights fly on in the cottages nearby. In such a sleepy place people become immediately alarmed at the sound of someone screaming bloody murder. I reach the pub where I just downed the pint in panic. A second later, I am connected to someone at 999.

“What’s the address of your emergency?” a voice comes on the line. “There’s a burglar in my cottage, no. 4 High Street,” I shriek and the handful of people in the pub turn to look at me with concern.

“Oh, you poor dear,” an elderly woman with heavily-scuffed shoes comes over to reassure me. “The police will nab him, I’m sure.”

Another man replies, “A burglar in Bourton? Preposterous.”

The general sentiment seems to be outrage that such a serious crime could be happening. Bourton, I am told by the barkeep, hasn’t seen any crime other than pickpocketing in ten years. But tonight, the tide is going to change, because tonight Bourton will see its first murder in more than a hundred years.

The police detective tells me I can’t remain in the cottage. It’s an active crime scene. I shake from head to toe glancing down at the fat, balding man that is lying face down on the street outside my cottage.

Was that bullet that killed him meant for me? Or was the murderer searching for something else —perhaps the Croesus fil
e
—
when the man from the pub confronted him? While the police are busy outside, taking gruesome photos of the poor, dead man from the pub, I glance about the living room. Everything seems intact. The files look untouched.

A police woman enters and yells at me to hurry. “You need to pack up some things and clear out. You can’t stay here. The police will need access to the crime scene 24/7.” She finishes her speech by telling me that as soon as I’m done gathering up my things, I need to come down to the station for some questioning.

I do as she says. It doesn’t take long to pack all my belongings. At the station I tell the police everything I know. Their eyebrows shoot a mile high when I tell them how the property was bequeathed to me after Sean’s murder.

“Another murder?” the police woman asks. When I’m done relying the facts of Sean’s murder, I contemplate telling them my suspicions. Should I tell them I believe Sean may have been selling antiquities on the black market? I decide to stay quiet. I could be completely wrong. I have no proof. Anyway, the detectives will be combing through the cottage soon and will probably confiscate all of Sean’s files. I’ll wait and let the police come to their own conclusions about the pictures in the Croesus file.

Before I leave, I give the local police Detective Puyn’s phone number in New York. They look very somber and tell me they will be in touch with the NYPD as soon as it’s morning.

“Until then, you need to vacate the premises. Oh, and under the circumstances Ms. Rue, we have to ask you not to leave the country.”

I let out a hollow laugh. Who would have ever thought I would hear that same phrase in two different countries in less than a week?