The Blood Royal

He saw Lily’s very different eyes flare in surprise and fix at once on the notes in front of her. All three of his suggestions were alarming and ought never to have been uttered, fuelled as they were by a cocktail of exhaustion, tension and guilt, and triggered by the lethal touch of female sympathy. Always his Achilles heel. Joe sensed, too late, that he was losing control, teetering on the crest of an emotional wave and threatening to drag this i

She seemed aware of the danger and, when he might have expected a hissing intake of breath and an offended drawing away of skirts at his desperate third suggestion, she replied calmly, ‘I don’t agree. There is a fourth. And I suspect it’s a course you’ve already decided on. We simply carry on doing our jobs for a bit longer. I’ve got a week to work out. That’s the routine. Not sure how long you have – it’s probably different for the upper ranks. I would suggest carrying on normally while awaiting further developments. See what the Home Secretary has to say and then think again.’

He nodded glumly, regretting his outburst and avoiding her eye.

‘And then, sir, when you know the worst, I’ll join you in whichever of the above schemes seems most attractive. With a preference for the last.’

He looked at her in sharp astonishment, sca

‘But may I substitute Nice as our destination? I hear it’s much more agreeable than Monte Carlo in high summer. And they have palm trees along the promenade. I’ve never seen a palm tree.’

Her ma

He grabbed a black felt hat from the hat stand and put it on, pulling it down exaggeratedly low over his forehead and leering. ‘There! What do you think? Shall I be taken for a Bolshevist, do you suppose?’

Lily responded to his flash of good humour with a chuckle. ‘Well, it’s certainly a look, sir. It goes with the red eyes and the purple bags under them. Cosmopolitan roué – would that be what you’re aiming for? It may pass in Piccadilly but I wouldn’t try it out in Eaton Square. They’ll string you up from the nearest lamp post.’ She turned back to the notes he’d passed her, eager to make a start.

‘And don’t think of making a run for it,’ he said, before he left. ‘I shall alert my secretary on my way out and tell her she’s to have you detained if you so much as put your nose round the door. She’s just across the corridor and she has a button to the desk downstairs. Oh … er, should you need to … um … Miss Jameson will show you the way.’

Oh, Lord! That was another thing. Facilities: females for the use of … Could they provide? He assumed there were such things in the Yard as Miss Jameson would have complained otherwise. And it was likely to be the least of the problems this wretched scheme threatened to lumber him with. Joe glanced over his shoulder at the earnest young face already totally absorbed by the distracting bone he’d thrown her way.

Bloody orders! This was a good officer. She deserved better.

Chapter Six

Left alone, Lily sat for a few minutes trying to make sense of the hastily assembled file. This was decidedly ‘works in progress’. A pile of papers had been scraped together from various sources: scene of crime notes, press cuttings and even letters on headed writing paper. This bird’s nest was destined, she expected, after passing through Miss Jameson’s typing machine, to be the building blocks of the final case file. After reviewing all the material and admiring the quality of the scene of crime work carried out by torchlight through the night, Lily managed to put it all into chronological order.

A devastating tale was begi

‘Thuggery on the streets of the West End,’ had been the deduction of two of the victims. But the third, Lansing, had sought out the receptive ear of Sandilands to express a different, more thoughtful, view. He’d exchanged words as well as blows with his two assailants and had been intrigued to receive a torrent of abuse delivered with an Irish accent. A southern Irish accent, he’d said firmly. His family had property near Dublin and he knew what he was talking about. Apart from Lansing’s certitude, there didn’t appear to be an obvious Irish co

Every day Irish desperadoes were setting their own cities ablaze, shooting and blowing up their countrymen, with no regard for age or sex, it seemed. Lily had cringed at the reports of families bombed to bits in the middle of the night, of men kidnapped, tortured and executed, of bodies left in the gutter. Only the day before, a little girl had answered a knock on the door and been shot in the stomach. With a shiver, Lily remembered reading the press speculation that the daily murders and explosions being suffered by that country could easily be exported to England.

Beaverbrook’s journals had thundered on for weeks about the dangers. It was just a matter of time and opportunity, they asserted. Significantly, the words ‘desperado’ and ‘hooligan’ had been replaced by the more alarming ‘terrorist’. There was a large population of Irish settlers in London, many with military training in the British army. They would have easy access to the arms and ammunition which lingered on in anonymous dumps in discreet places after the war and they would have the will and the skill to use them. In a city crowded with immigrants from many nations, the Irish blended in better than most, being indistinguishable in appearance from the native Englishmen. And unless they cared to engage you in conversation, revealing their accents, or a

Sandilands seemed to have been handed a list of endangered politicians and public figures. Police squads had been allocated to these gentlemen. But before his plans could be put into action, the patrols had been stood down at the request of the potential victims themselves. Copies of their letters to Sandilands had been kept. Dear Commander … frightfully grateful and all that … military man myself … not in my own capital … no necessity … must therefore decline …