Free The Last Queen of England by Steve Robinson Page A

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