Blood Royal (4 page)

He hadn’t always been a tabloid reporter, using his imagination to give stories a slant that appealed to the reading public’s lust for serial killers and the sex lives of the rich and famous. There was a time when he had been a respected journalist, a prizewinning investigative reporter who had his own byline and dug deep into the ills and sins of society. Those days were years past, that life was trashed because he had made a mistake that cost the life of someone he loved. Now, like the never-ending revenge Zeus took on Prometheus, chaining him to a mountain and sending an eagle to eat his immortal liver, Dutton was doomed to assault his liver with booze while he cranked out imaginative tabloid trash.

It was his damn imagination that got him into invading the Abbey in the first place. He tended to believe his source, Howler, a onetime famous plastic surgeon, long prohibited from practicing after he gave one poor bastard a Boris Karloff face. The fact that he had been under the influence of a controlled substance at the time was a given. Howler now supported his drug habit doing part-time work for the coroner’s office, reconstructing stiffs who were no longer recognizable so they could be identified.

Howler was a crazy, but he had that sly perception of some addicts that seems to remain behind after the druggies have burned out trillions of brain cells and begin to look like cast members of
Night of the Living Dead.

His heart stopped again—something in the place—or in his imagination—moved in the darkness.

Somebody there?
he almost croaked, but choked back the question.

He was between the proverbial rock and hard place. There weren’t any guards inside the Abbey, though he assumed they had to be somewhere nearby. If he stood up and started screaming, maybe they’d come running—and maybe, when they found him, he’d get five-to-ten at Dartmoor Prison for invading a national treasure. He had already done a few months in jail, back in those heady days before he fell from grace as a reporter for a prestigious newspaper and turned to shoveling muck for the muckiest tabloid in the country. And he wasn’t anxious to return. There were people in jail a lot crazier and meaner than even the ones he dealt with for the tabloid.

He also wasn’t anxious to make news in a more gruesome way. He was beginning to wonder if he would end up as the lead story in his own paper—
Crazed Killer Skins Reporter Alive as Elvis Watches
was how a good tabloid headline editor would run the story on the front page.

Before he risked prison or tabloid immortality, he had to find out what—
who
—was in the shadows. And hope it wasn’t an ax murderer.

Com’on, moon.
The place was creepy enough without shadows that moved. It was supposed to be a church, but somewhere along the line they started planting people inside like the pharaohs of old Egypt. Most of the bodies were in granite-looking tombs standing four or five feet high with the form of a body lying on top. As in the case of Henry III, Dutton didn’t know if the bodies decked out on top of the tombs were bronze statues of the dead person or were actual bodies bronzed. Whatever they were, all the bodies lying around made the place ghoulish in the darkness even if they were a bunch of kings and queens, poets and statesmen. A ghost was a ghost.

His phone rang.
It was in his breast pocket, a palm-sized cellular. Well, it didn’t actually ring—he had the ringing turned off and the vibration mode on. He felt the vibration against his heart. It kept going off and he grabbed it.

“What?” he whispered.

“Did you find the body of the crime?”

Dutton groaned, tempted to throw the phone down and jump up and down on it. “There’s someone in here with me,” he whispered hoarsely to Cohn, his editor.

“In the Abbey?”

“Where the fuck do you think I’m at? I dropped by to be fuckin’ crowned.”

“Good Lord! It’s probably a serial killer, someone Howler learned about at the coroner’s office. A killer in there with you, what a story.”

“I’m going to be fuckin’ murdered.”

“
Grrreat
story. What—what does he look like?”

“How would I know? Don’t you give a shit that I’ll be murdered?”

“Of course I care, Tony.” Cohn’s voice was honey.

The last time Dutton had heard the man’s voice purr like that was when he had called in a story that one of the Royals was caught on camera having her toes sucked on the Riviera by her accountant—while people in Rwanda were eating children to stay alive.

Dutton shut off the phone and put it back in his pocket, cutting off Cohn. Lousy bastard. A tabloid editor’s heart was harder than that of a Soho whore.

The moon was coming out again, giving the window a faint gloomy glow as cheerful as a granite headstone. As the hazy glow spread, shadows formed in the cathedral and appeared to move.

Was that all I saw? A play of shadows?

He let out a deep breath of relief that he had cooped up somewhere.

You’re just a schoolgirl, Tony Dutton. No guts. Now get your ass in gear.

*   *   *

A
CROSS THE HOLY OF
holies cathedral, a rat scurried across the floor. It was no ordinary rat but the breed of a big, brutal creature known as a wharf rat that had invaded the public buildings near the Thames since Britannia first ruled the waves and ships returned home from faraway lands with more than cargo.

The rodent went up the tomb of Queen Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, coming to rest on top of the queen’s effigy atop the tomb. In the opposite wing was Mary, Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth impolitely had beheaded because of a disagreement over whose church wore the biggest boots.

The rat stopped and sniffed the air. Lacking Tony Dutton’s imagination, it was not at all concerned about the metal statues it ran over. The rat was a carnivore and the blood it sensed was fresher than the centuries-old corpse entombed beneath it.

The rat had followed the scent of blood across the Abbey. Now its nervous system caught on fire and it froze, ready to dash away as its own dark eyes locked on to a pair of startling blue ones.

Dutton crept down the center aisle, keeping to the right side. He was certain that what he had seen was nothing more than shadows that moved as clouds swept the light of the moon coming through windows, but … he wasn’t
that
sure.

He hummed a little, almost noiselessly, a little air passing his lips to keep him company, to give a little
life
to the oversized crypt of a church. He’d had to memorize Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” as a kid and some of the lines never left him. Now he hummed a bit of it.
Half a league, half a league, half a league onward, into the valley of death rode the six hundred, cannon right and left, brave six hundred, do and die …
He wondered if Tennyson was buried in Westminster.

He wondered what he had seen in the darkness.

His phone vibrated in his breast pocket again and he ignored it. It was probably Cohn calling to see if he could get an exclusive interview with the killer while the maniac chopped up Dutton’s body. Tabloid editors had the moral fiber of used-car salesmen and child pornographers.

He reached the entrance to Henry VII’s chapel and paused, crouching down to make a smaller target. The whole damn place was dark, but the blackest pool was the left side of the chamber. He had to get across that murky sea and into the tombs beyond. When he got out of this mess—
if he got out in one piece
—he was going to pay Howler a visit. The guy had fed him dirt for years without ever raising doubt as to his credibility, but this was a corker.

Howler was no ordinary tipster about bodies—he knew a lot about the dead. Howler had started on the slippery slope of addiction two decades ago when he found that he got no satisfaction from cocaine—and graduated to heroin. In between trips to hospitals when he overdosed and jail cells when he got caught buying and selling, besides his work at the morgue to re-create people, he got occasional work from Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum—reconstructing victims of infamous crimes for the Chamber of Horrors section.

The coroner and the Chamber of Horrors, not very pleasant work either way. Gruesome, was how Dutton thought of the man, gruesome in appearance and in the workings of his mind. If he wasn’t cast as part of the living dead, he’d have done well in the role of the psycho motel manager in Hitchcock’s most famous thriller. Dutton had heard that of late Howler had developed another quirk—weenie-waving. He liked to stand at the glass doors of tube trains and open his raincoat, exposing his dick as the train rolled into a crowded station.

Howler had sold him information about morgue cases for years. His gruesome, inside details on the Little Red Riding Hood Murders got Dutton’s lurid stories on the front page of the tabloid for ten editions. His information was always as accurate as it was macabre.

This time Howler called and told him that he had evidence of an even bigger royal scandal than the princess shooting the Prince of Wales.

Dutton had laughed when Howler said it. Nothing less than bona fide proof of the end of the world would be bigger than the princess blowing away the heir to the throne on national TV. But what the hell, Howler probably had something big even if it couldn’t be
that
big.

He had refused to say what Dutton would find in the Abbey other than his cryptic hints about the body of the crime. A royal cover-up, was how Dutton took Howler’s innuendos and inferences. But a cover-up about what? And what could Westminster, England’s holy of holies, have to do with it?

Now I’ve fallen to burglarizing churches,
he thought.
How the mighty have fallen.
He was once a highly regarded journalist, a gonzo newspaperman—outlaw reporting, writing unrestrained stories about the dark streets of London, the ones tourists—and the police—rarely tread. His stories were full of unusual characters, street people, and often carried a social impact. In those high-flying days, he’d won the British Press Award and What the Papers Say Award. But he fell from grace with respectable reporting after a news source, a woman, was murdered due to his negligence. Racked with the pain of guilt, like Howler, he didn’t tumble from his perch in life, but had belly-flopped into the gutter, clutching a bottle of cheap booze with him. It had taken six years to dry out enough for him to write hack articles for a tabloid.

The moon came and went again and did little to illuminate any of the demons Tony Dutton’s endless imagination could conjure. There was only one way he could get across that black pool—get up and walk across it. He hadn’t brought a flashlight because it would risk having him discovered, but right about now he was willing to risk a little discovery over bumping into
God knows what
in the dark.

He stood up, took a deep breath, and briskly walked into the chapel. He took ten steps when he stumbled over something and went crashing to the ground.

Music suddenly erupted.
Dutton’s heart almost jumped out of his chest.

Organ music filled the hollow guts of the Abbey, somber, soul-shaking tones of a powerful, cathedral-sized organ. Stage lighting went on around the large instrument.

He realized he had stumbled over a control box for God’s Voice, the German organ on display from Cologne. He had seen the damn box earlier when he was playing tourist. Now the sounds of Beethoven’s “Funeral March” boomed in the cathedral like a big foghorn on a small puddle, making enough noise to wake the dead and alert every guard station for miles.

He ran for the tombs in the chapel, crouching beside the Virgin Queen’s crypt, peeping back out between the wooden bars for the guards that he expected at any moment. He backed away from the grille, on his hands and knees. His foot hit something—
holy shit, he’d bumped into someone.

He let out a yell and spun around, fist cocked, ready to swing. Enough light came from the organ spotlights to reveal someone sitting in the throne chair on display in the crypt. He saw the legs and clothing first, a man in a Tudor-era dress.

It appeared to be a life-sized wax dummy, the sort of thing he’d seen at Madame Tussaud’s. As his eyes focused he realized that there was something on the man’s lap.

A head. The head of a woman.

He heard a drip.

Dark liquid was dripping off the chair the figure was sitting on.

Blood.

Westminster Abbey

Rotten luck, Dutton thought. He would have preferred getting chopped up by a serial killer than falling into the hands of Inspector Bram Archer of the Metropolitan Police—Scotland Yard—Homicide Division.

Archer was in the crypt examining the body—and the head in its lap—and had posted Dutton on a bench in an anteroom with one of the Abbey guards who had come running when Dutton began screaming. It was past two in the morning and the guard, an elderly pensioner doing light duty after retiring from a clerical job with the Ministry of Housing, was nodding off beside Dutton.

Dutton tried to think of all the reasons Archer hated him and it really boiled down to one: a story Dutton wrote when he was still a respectable award-winning journalist, an exposé on excessive force in arrests involving minorities. He reported a case in which Archer had broken both arms of a nineteen-year-old small-time Jamaican drug dealer. Something to do with the guy spitting on Archer.

Dutton was trying to think of other reasons the homicide detective would have to hate him when Archer’s partner came out of the crypt area.

Dutton smiled with false cheer at Sergeant Lois Kramer. Kramer was a well-nourished blonde with a healthy bustline and a lovely well-rounded ass. “Good to see you, Lois. How are things?”

“We’re going to hang you on this one, you rotten, slimy son-of-a-bitch.”

“Lois—”

“I’m surprised you can remember my name. You kissed up to me to get information, then dumped me.”

“I—”

“I turned down a date with a real man to meet you, only to spend the evening twiddling my thumbs in a pub because you never showed up.” She leaned down so they were face-to-face. “And what really pisses me off is the guy I stood up won the lottery and married some tart I can’t stand.”