Free The Last Queen of England by Steve Robinson Page B

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.

    The American threw you, didn’t he? he thought, knowing that this time there would be no surprises.

 
           
      
      
    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