Authors: Rhys Bowen
Royal Flush
Table of Contents
Berkley Prime Crime titles by Rhys Bowen
Royal Spyness Mysteries
HER ROYAL SPYNESS
A ROYAL PAIN
ROYAL FLUSH
Constable Evans Mysteries
EVANS ABOVE
EVAN HELP US
EVANLY CHOIRS
EVAN AND ELLE
EVAN CAN WAIT
EVANS TO BETSY
EVAN ONLY KNOWS
EVAN’S GATE
EVAN BLESSED
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
eISBN : 978-1-101-10491-0
1. Aristocracy (Social class)—Great Britain—Fiction. 2. Attempted assassination—Fiction. I Title.
PR6052.O848R68 2009
823’.914—dc22 2009004738
This book is dedicated to Merion Webster Sauer and her son, Lee, who
have been temporarily elevated to the peerage.
My grateful thanks as always to John and Jane for their wonderful
insights and critiques, and to Jackie Cantor and Meg Ruley for
making my writing life so easy, pleasant and fun.
Author’s Note
Although real people walk across these pages, this book is purely fictional. Balmoral is portrayed just as it is, but if you try to find Castle Rannoch on the map, it only exists in my imagination. And I’m afraid I’ve taken liberties with the road from Balmoral to Castle Rannoch. There really is no serviceable direct route, but I’ve had one made through the mountains for the purposes of this book.
Chapter 1
Rannoch House
Belgrave Square
London W.1.
August 12, 1932
It is my opinion that there is no place on earth more uncomfortable than London during a heat wave. I should probably qualify this by confessing that I have never gone up the Congo River into the Heart of Darkness with Conrad, nor have I crossed the Sahara by camel. But at least people venturing to those parts are prepared to be uncomfortable. London is so seldom even vaguely warm that we are always caught completely unprepared. The tube turns into a good imitation of the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta and the smell of unwashed armpits, strap-hanging inches from one’s face, is overwhelming.
You may be wondering whether members of the royal family frequently ride on the underground. The answer, of course, is no. My austere relatives King George V and Queen Mary would have only the vaguest idea of what the tube train was. Of course, I am only thirty-fourth in line to the throne, and I am probably the only member of my family who was at that moment penniless and trying to survive on her own, in London, without servants. So let me introduce myself before we continue. My full name is Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie of Glen Garry and Rannoch. My grandmother was the least attractive of Queen Victoria’s many daughters, judging by those early photographs I’ve seen of her. But then those old photographs did tend to make most people look grouchy, didn’t they? Anyway, no proposals from kaisers or kings were forthcoming for her, so she was hitched to a Scottish duke and lived at Castle Rannoch, in remotest Scotland, until she died of fresh air and boredom.
My brother, Binky, is the current duke. He’s also pretty much penniless, our father having lost the last of the family fortune in the great crash of ’29, before shooting himself on the moors and saddling Binky with horrendous death duties. At least Binky’s got the estate with the home farm and the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’, as the landed gentry are wont to say, so he’s not exactly starving. I’ve been living on baked beans, toast and tea. I was raised with no skills other than passable French, knowing how to walk with a book on my head and where to seat a bishop at a dinner table. Hardly enough to tempt a prospective employer, if getting an ordinary job were not frowned upon for someone in my position. I tried it once—the cosmetics counter at Harrods. I lasted all of four hours.
And of course England is in the midst of a most awful depression. You only have to look on any street corner at those tragic men standing with signs saying
Will accept any kind of work
to know that things are pretty grim for most people. Not for most of my social class, however. For most of them life goes on unchanged, with yachts on the Med and extravagant parties. They probably don’t even know the country is in a bad way.
So now you know why there is no Bentley and chauffeur parked outside Rannoch House, our family’s London home on Belgrave Square, and why I can’t even afford to take a taxicab too often. I do usually try to avoid the tube, however. For a country-bred girl like myself the descent into that black hole has always been a cause for alarm—and more so since I was almost pushed under a train by a man who was trying to kill me.
But on this occasion I had no choice. Central London was so unbearably stifling that I decided to go and visit my grandfather, who lives on the fringes of London in Essex, and the District Line was the way to travel. Oh, and I suppose I should clarify that I’m not speaking about my grandfather the Scottish duke, whose ghost is still reputed to play the bagpipes on the battlements of our ancestral home, Castle Rannoch in Perthshire, Scotland. I’m speaking of my nonroyal grandfather, who lives just outside London in a modest semidetached with gnomes in the front garden. You see, my mother was an actress and the daughter of a Cockney policeman. She was also a notorious bolter. She left my father when I was only two and has subsequently worked her way from an Argentinian polo player, to a Monte Carlo rally driver and a Texan oil millionaire. Her romantic exploits have truly spanned the globe, unlike her daughter who has yet to have a romantic exploit.
After she bolted I was raised at Castle Rannoch. As you can imagine, I was kept well away from my mother’s side of the family when I was growing up. So I have only just got to know my grandfather and frankly I adore him. He is the only person in the world with whom I can be myself. It’s like having a real family for once!
To my intense disappointment my grandfather was not at home. Neither was the widow next door with whom he had developed a close friendship. If Granddad had been on the phone, I could have saved myself the trip. But the idea of telephone communication hadn’t exactly reached darkest Essex yet. I was standing in Granddad’s front garden, under the disapproving stare of those gnomes, not sure what to do next, when an elderly man walked past with an elderly dog on a leash. He looked at me then shook his head.
“He ain’t there, love. He’s gone.” (He pronounced it “gawn.”)
“Gone? Where?” I asked in alarm as visions of hospitals or worse swam into my head. Granddad’s health had not been too brilliant recently.
“Down Clacton.”
I had no idea what a Clacton was or how one went down it. “Down Clacton?” I repeated hopefully.
He nodded. “Yeah. Workingmen’s club outing. In the charabanc. Her next door went with him.” And he gave me a knowing wink. I let out a sigh of relief. An outing. In a coach. Probably to the seaside. So even my grandfather was managing to escape the heat. I had no choice but to take the train back to the city. All my friends had deserted London for their country estates, their yachts or the Continent, and here I was, feeling hot and increasingly despondent in a carriage full of sweaty bodies.
“What am I doing here?” I asked myself. I had no skills, no hope of employment and no idea where to turn next. Nobody with any sense and money stayed in London during the month of August. And as for Darcy, the wild son of an Irish peer whom I thought was my current boyfriend . . . I hadn’t heard from him since he disappeared yet again, ostensibly to go home to Ireland to recover from his gunshot wound. This might be true, or it might not. With Darcy one never knew.
Of course I could go home to Scotland, I told myself, as the air in the tube train became stifling. The memory of the cold wind sweeping down the loch and the equally cold drafts sweeping down the corridors of Castle Rannoch was sorely tempting as I rode the escalator up from St. James’s tube station, dabbing ineffectively at the beads of sweat trickling down my face. And yes, I know ladies don’t sweat, but something was running down my face in great rivulets.
I was almost ready to rush home to Belgrave Square, pack a suitcase and catch the next train to Edinburgh, when I reminded myself why I had left home in the first place. The answer was Fig, my sister-in-law, the current duchess—mean-spirited, judgmental and utterly awful. Fig had made it very clear that I was a burden to them, no longer wanted at Castle Rannoch, and that she begrudged my eating their food. So when it came to enduring the heat and loneliness in London or enduring Fig, the heat won out.
Only two more weeks, I told myself as I walked home through Hyde Park. In two weeks’ time I was invited to Scotland, not to my ancestral home, but to Balmoral. The king and queen had already gone up to their Scottish castle, just a few miles from our own, in time for the Glorious Twelfth, the day when the grouse shooting season officially begins. They would remain there, shooting and stalking anything with fur or feathers, for the next month and expected their various relatives to come and stay for at least part of this time. Most people tried to avoid this: they found the bagpipes at dawn, the wind moaning down the chimney, the Highland dances and the tartan wallpaper hard to endure. I was used to all this. It was just like Castle Rannoch.
Cheered by the prospect of good, fresh Highland air in the not-too-distant future, I picked my way past the bodies in Green Park. It looked like the aftermath of a particularly nasty battle—with half-naked corpses strewn everywhere. They were, in fact, London office workers making the most of the weather, sunbathing with their shirts off. A frightful sight—the bodies striped white and red depending on which parts of them had been exposed to the sun. I was halfway across the park when the bodies started to move. I noticed the sun had disappeared and at the very moment I looked up there was an ominous rumble of thunder.
The sky darkened quickly as storm clouds gathered. The sunbathers were hastily putting on their shirts and making for shelter. I began to hurry too. Not fast enough, however. Without warning the heavens opened and rain came down in a solid sheet. Girls ran screaming to the shelter of trees, which was probably not wise, given the approaching sounds of thunder. Hail bounced from the footpaths. There was no point in my seeking shelter. I was already soaked to the skin and home was only minutes away. So I ran, my hair plastered to my face, my summer frock clinging suggestively to my body, until I staggered up the steps of Rannoch House.
If I had felt depressed before, I was now well and truly in the dumps. What else could possibly go wrong? I had come to London full of hope and excitement, and nothing seemed to be working out. Then I caught sight of myself in the hall stand mirror and recoiled in horror. “Just look at you!” I said aloud. “You look like a drowned rat. If the queen could see you now.” Then I started to laugh. I laughed all the way upstairs to the bathroom, where I took a long soak in the tub. By the time I had dried myself off I was feeling quite normal again. And I wasn’t going to spend another dreary evening alone in Rannoch House with only the radio for company. Someone apart from me must be in London. And of course I immediately thought of Belinda. She was one of those people who never stayed in one place for long. When last seen she was flitting off to a villa in Italy but there was just a chance she might have tired of Italians and come home.
I sought out the least rumpled of my summer dresses (having had no maid to iron my clothes for a while now and very little idea how to iron them myself), hid my wet hair under a demure cloche hat and set off for Belinda’s mews cottage, in nearby Knightsbridge. Unlike me, Belinda had come into an inheritance when she turned twenty-one. This had enabled her to buy a dinky little mews establishment and keep a maid. Also her living costs were practically nil, given the amount of time she spent in other people’s homes, not to mention their beds.
The thunderstorm had passed over, leaving the evening air slightly cooler but still muggy. I picked my way past puddles and avoided the taxicabs that splashed through standing water on the street. I was at the entrance to the mews when I heard a loud roaring sound behind me. I was conscious of a sleek dark shape hurtling toward me and only just had time to fling myself aside as a motor bicycle came at me. It shot through the enormous puddle that had collected at the mews entrance, sending a great sheet of muddy water all over me.
“I say!” I tried to shout over the roar of the engine as it continued into the mews without slowing. I took off in pursuit, absolutely boiling with rage now, not pausing to consider whether the bike riders might be bank robbers or burglars fleeing from the police. The motorbike skidded to a halt farther down the mews and two men dressed in leather jackets, leather helmets and goggles were starting to dismount.
“What the devil do you think you were doing?” I demanded as I approached them, my anger still blinding me to the fact that I was alone in a backstreet with two distinctly antisocial characters. “Just look at what you did. I’m soaked.”
“Yes, you do appear to have become a trifle wet,” the first rider said, and to my extreme annoyance, he started to laugh.
“It’s not funny!” I snapped. “You have ruined a perfectly good dress, and as for my hat . . .”
The person who had been riding pillion dismounted and was in the process of unbuckling a helmet. “Of course it’s not funny, Paolo.” The voice was female, and she pulled off her helmet and goggles with a flourish, shaking out a sleek head of dark bobbed hair.
“Belinda!” I exclaimed.