Crowned and Dangerous (A Royal Spyness Mystery) (21 page)

“So where did you get your hands on this ancient Rolls?”

“Ah, that came from the great-aunt Georgie is staying with.”

“A great-aunt? Nearby?”

“Yes, we’ll be passing the house shortly.”

“Then why didn’t you say so before I checked into the Shelbourne? I could stay there too, couldn’t I?” Zou Zou said.

Oh crikey, I thought, trying to picture the glamorous princess among the dust and chaos of Oona’s house. Darcy must have had the same thoughts.

“It’s not up to your standards, Zou Zou,” Darcy said. “The place has gone to wrack and ruin and they are living with almost no servants. She’s an eccentric old biddy. He’s as queer as a coot.”

“But I could rough it. I’m a lot tougher than I seem. I’ve climbed the Matterhorn, you know. And I’ve been marooned in a snowdrift in Bulgaria—surrounded by wolves. I’m sure I could cope with a batty great-aunt. Is it only a tiny cottage, then?”

I was about to say that yes, it was a tiny cottage. Unfortunately, at that moment we were passing the entrance to Oona’s driveway. The rambling old house could be seen and I had found that Darcy wasn’t good at telling lies. Subterfuge, yes. Withholding information, definitely, but there was something in his upbringing that made lying impossible. I’m the same. It’s that duty and integrity that are rammed down the throat of every upper-class child by nannies and governesses.

“Actually that’s the house, through the trees back there,” he said,
“but really, it isn’t fit for guests, and I think it would embarrass Great-Aunt Oona to have a guest of your quality pressed upon her.”

“Georgiana is of my quality,” she said. “And the house looks charming. Certainly enough bedrooms to find a spot for little
moi
.”

She really did see things through rose-tinted spectacles, I thought. The house looked old, rambling and almost derelict, but could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as charming.

“And this is all their land?” she went on. “Perfect. I can park my plane in one of their barns. Why don’t we go and pay a call on them now and get everything settled? I’m sure a local peasant boy can tow my plane over on his tractor, or I could even fly it over. That might be more fun.”

“Zou Zou, I really think you’d be happier at the Shelbourne,” Darcy said. “I really don’t mind driving over to pick you up. And we’ll want to go back to Dublin anyway to meet your barrister.”

“Anyone would think you didn’t want me to meet your relatives, Darcy,” she said in a peeved voice. “If we were in Poland I’d be happy to take you to see my batty relatives. Including Great-Uncle Zygmund, who thinks he is Napoleon but is quite harmless.”

Darcy had to laugh at this. “And my great-uncle Dooley is currently playing at the battle of Waterloo. They’d get on well together.”

“Only Dooley would want to capture Napoleon,” I pointed out. “He was about to do so when I left today.”

“They sound absolutely delightful. Much more fun than the staff at the stuffy Shelbourne and ‘Yes, Your Highness, no, Your Highness.’ And Georgie can lend me her maid. I had to leave mine behind in London because she gets horribly airsick.”

“I didn’t bring my maid, I’m afraid,” I said. “I left her in London too.”

“Then we’ll both rough it together. Jolly good fun.” She tapped Darcy on the shoulder. “Don’t you dare try to drive past.”

Poor Darcy. He glanced at me, then at Oona’s driveway. “But you’ve left all your things at the Shelbourne,” he said, “and I don’t feel like driving all the way back there to retrieve them. Why don’t you go back to the Shelbourne tonight and I’ll broach the subject carefully with my aunt,” Darcy said. “And if she is up to another guest we can fetch your suitcase tomorrow.”

“Oh, all right,” she said, miffed at not getting her own way, I suspected.

I heaved a sigh of relief. By tomorrow all sorts of things might have happened. She might be called back to London. The clouds had now thickened and hung low and heavy over the distant mountains.

“It’s going to rain again,” I said.

“Then we must hurry back to my poor little plane and find a tarpaulin or somewhere to put it,” she said. “We can’t have the cockpit filling with water.”

At least this had stopped her from wanting to meet Great-Aunt Oona. We drove through the village. Several men who were clearly from the press were standing together outside the pub. They looked up at us with interest as we drove past.

“Oh Lord, that’s torn it,” Darcy said. “What’s the betting they follow us?”

“Then I shall tell them that I am the Princess Zamanska and I am thinking of buying this racing stable now that its owner is deceased,” she said. “You two are my faithful retainers.”

“I rather fear they’d recognize both of your faithful retainers,” Darcy said.

“No matter. Lady Georgiana has simply come with me as my companion.”

This did seem like a good solution and one that didn’t make suspicious people tie me in any way to Darcy.

As we turned in to the lane raindrops started to spatter on
the windscreen. The clouds looked as if they might open at any moment.

“Does your father have a tarpaulin or anything that might cover the aeroplane?” she asked. “Or could we push it into an outbuilding?”

“The outbuildings are all on the estate, currently watched by a Garda,” Darcy said. “My father merely has a garden shed, not big enough for an aeroplane. But they should have something to cover a cockpit at the stables. Let’s go and ask.”

We did, this time not seeing Ted Benson but a stable boy who knew Darcy and who found us a piece of oilcloth that would do the trick. It was now raining hard and the princess sat in the backseat of the motor as we returned to the field with the aeroplane in it. Darcy and I, dressed more sensibly for inclement weather, got out and managed to cover the cockpit. The rest of the plane would just have to get wet for now. We had just finished our task and were returning to the motorcar when we heard the sound of an approaching vehicle.

“Those bloody reporters,” Darcy muttered, and sure enough the motorcar stopped and out climbed three men wearing trilby hats and raincoats.

“Excuse me, could we have a word?” One of them came toward us with a notebook at the ready. “Are you connected to Lord Kilhenny? Coming to visit him?”

Zou Zou wound down her window. “These kind people were just helping me with my dear little aeroplane,” she said in a strong foreign accent, quite unlike her normal voice. “I had to make an emergency landing in this field and now I must find a way to have it towed. So annoying.”

“And your name, madam?”

“I am not a madam,” she said, her hand at her throat in a dramatic gesture. “I am a princess. Princess Alexandra Maria Zamanska.”

I think we might have fooled them and they might have left us
alone except at that moment a voice bellowed out, “What the hell is that aeroplane doing in the field? Are you reporters coming in from the sky now? Go on, be off with you. I’ve told you you’re wasting your time. I’ve nothing to say to you. Now beat it before I get my shotgun.”

T
UESDAY
, D
ECEMBER
4

B
ACK
IN
K
ILHENNY
AT
THE
GAMEKEEPER
’
S
LODGE
.

Lord Kilhenny stood there, his hair wild and windswept, and wearing a black smoking jacket. He reminded me of an aging Heathcliff or even a Lord Byron. In fact he looked so formidable that the reporters actually headed back to their motorcar and drove off.

As the motorcar backed away he turned on us. “And that means you too. I don’t know who the hell you are, but you are not welcome here.”

“Father, this is my good friend Princess Alexandra Zamanska.” Darcy stepped in to intercept his father as he advanced on the Rolls. “And she was good enough to fly her aeroplane over to Ireland because she wanted to help you. At this very moment a barrister friend of hers is searching out the best defense counsel in Ireland on your behalf.”

Lord Kilhenny took in the glamorous woman in the backseat of the Rolls. “Why on earth would you go to that amount of trouble
for me, Your Highness?” he demanded. “You don’t know me from Adam.”

“Because I adore your son and I can see that this silly business could ruin his life.”

“I don’t want charity. I don’t need charity. So thank you very much but please leave.” He stood there with his arms folded across his chest, glaring at her defiantly.

“Silly stubborn man,” Princess Zamanska said. “You should at least listen to what we have to say. We want to help you. Don’t you understand that?”

“But don’t
you
understand, it’s no good.” He turned his head away. “Even if I could afford the best barrister in Ireland, there’s nothing he or you can do. There’s nothing anyone can do, as I keep telling this son of mine. That brainless inspector has decided I’m guilty and that’s that.”

Princess Zamanska opened the door of the Rolls and stepped down. The wind swept at her dark mink coat and she drew it around her. She looked like a figure from a tragic Russian novel. “The whole question comes down to this,” she said, walking toward him. “Do you think you are guilty?”

“I don’t know!” he shouted at her over the wind. “I don’t goddamn well know. I can’t remember a damned thing. And what does it matter anyway?”

“Because if you don’t let people help you, if you aren’t prepared to help yourself, you will hang,” she said.

“I really don’t care,” he said. “I’ve lost everything that matters to me.”

While this exchange had been going on, I had also gotten out of the motorcar, and was standing there unnoticed in the background as the scene played out. I knew it would be wiser to stay silent, but when I heard him say those words something inside me snapped. I stalked up to him. “That is a cruel and wicked thing to say. You have a son who loves you, who has done nothing to warrant the way you
have treated him. He came rushing to your side the moment he heard of your predicament, and what’s more he had to leave something that was really important to him. But he didn’t hesitate for a second, even though he said you wouldn’t welcome him.”

Lord Kilhenny’s gaze moved from me to Darcy and back again. “A friend from London, eh?” There was almost the hint of a smile. “Didn’t fool me for a second.
You
were the thing that was important to him, weren’t you?”

Darcy stepped to my side. “That’s right, Father. Before this we were actually on our way to be married. Afterward I realized we could no longer marry; I didn’t want her to suffer through being associated with me. I tried to end all contact with her. But she wouldn’t listen. She came here anyway. That’s what people do when they care about each other.”

There was a long silence, then Lord Kilhenny said gruffly, “You’d better come inside. We’re all getting soaked standing here.”

He led the way back to the lodge. It was a gloomy little place, dark with low ceilings and heavy dark furniture. I could easily see how a person could become depressed living alone there.

“I’ll make us some tea,” Darcy said. “Unless Mrs. McNalley is around?”

“I sent her home and told her to stay away from here for the time being,” Lord Kilhenny said. “I don’t want her bothered by those bloody pressmen every time she sets foot outside the door.”

“I can make the tea,” I said. “I’m good at it.”

“A young lady of many talents,” Lord Kilhenny said. “I suppose you’d better introduce us properly, Darcy.”

“Father, this is Georgiana Rannoch,” Darcy said. “Georgie, may I present my father, Lord Kilhenny.”

If the situation hadn’t been so deadly serious I think we would have laughed. Being presented with great formality to a man I hoped would be my future father-in-law in a poky little living room with a smoky fire was just too absurd.

“Rannoch?” he said. “Daughter of the duke?”

I nodded.

“You and Darcy make a good pair. Your father was as useless as I have been.”

I could see what Darcy had told me about his father not being an easy man. I didn’t reply to this but went through to the kitchen. There was evidence here of a woman’s touch. Mrs. McNalley had left everything spotless and neat. I put the kettle on and found the pot and tea caddy. Then I put cups and saucers on a tray and added a milk jug and a sugar bowl. When I brought the tray back out, they were sitting in armchairs around the fire, not saying much by the look of it. I handed each of them a cup.

“Now, this is a novelty,” Lord Kilhenny said. “It’s not every day I sit next to a princess and I’m waited on by the daughter of a royal duke.”

“Then you should take that as a sign that you have help in high places,” Zou Zou said. “We are here. We came to Ireland for one reason. To save you from the hangman’s noose. So let’s get started. Darcy?”

She turned to Darcy, who was staring into the flickering flames of the fire. Wind puffed smoke down the chimney, making it swirl out across the room. Darcy cleared his throat then spoke. “You say you remember nothing about that evening. Have no details come back to you? You don’t remember going over to the castle?”

“In the afternoon, I did,” Lord Kilhenny said. “But as to the evening, it’s all a blank. I remember sitting down and pouring myself a glass of Jameson and turning on the wireless to listen to the news. The next thing I knew it was daylight and the police were pounding on the door.”

“When you went up to the castle in the afternoon, apparently you had an argument with Mr. Roach. The valet overheard you shouting.”

Lord Kilhenny nodded. “That is correct. I was furious. I got a
copy of an auction catalog and I learned that he planned to sell several of our family treasures, including the Burda club. I went up to the castle to tell him he couldn’t do that. They belonged in the castle—they were part of the O’Mara family heritage.”

“Why did you let him have those things in the first place?” Darcy demanded. “Surely they could have been kept out of the sale.”

“Should have,” Lord Kilhenny said angrily. “Naturally I assumed that I would be able to keep items that were important to me. But his damned lawyer had things written in such a way that I couldn’t touch anything on the estate the moment the document was signed. I was lucky to come away with my clothes. I also thought, naïvely as it turned out, that if Roach and I worked together, if the stables flourished, we’d develop an understanding between us and I could ask for the return of items that meant a lot to me but not to him. That never happened. The man kept his distance and only spoke to me when absolutely necessary. He treated me like a hired hand, and what’s more he enjoyed it. I think it gave him great pleasure to lord it over a real lord. He was a sadistic bastard. He deserved to be wiped from the face of the earth.”

“None of this looks good for you, Father,” Darcy said. “It gives you a strong motive to want him dead.”

“I agree,” Lord Kilhenny said, “and if the prosecution asks me if I wanted him dead, I’d have to answer honestly that I would have rejoiced at that news.”

Darcy sighed. “So you saw he was about to put certain items up for auction and went to confront him.”

“That’s right. He had the club lying on the table. I picked it up and tried to tell him how important it had been to the history of our family. I told him I would buy it from him if he’d give me time to raise the money. And do you know what? He laughed at me. He said he knew a couple of museums that would be willing to pay more money for the club than I’d ever raise in my lifetime. Then he
taunted me and said I should have hired myself a sharper lawyer when the deeds were drawn up.”

“What did you do then?” Darcy asked in a quiet voice.

“I put down the club. I told him that one day he’d push me too far and then I stalked out. I walked around the grounds for a while to calm down. Then I went home.”

We sat there, all of us staring into the fire, wrapped in our own thoughts. Then Darcy said, “It seems to me, Father, that the evidence against you is centered on your fingerprints on that club. Yours and only yours.”

“That struck me as strange too,” I said. “You say the club was on the table. Someone must have lifted it from the wall and left their own fingerprints on it. Come to that, it must have been handled millions of times. So why just your fingerprints? It makes me think that someone deliberately set you up to look like the murderer.”

“Who would do that?” Lord Kilhenny asked. “And why?”

“There’s something we found out in Dublin today that may change everything,” Darcy said. “The murder victim was not really Timothy Roach. He was using a dead man’s passport.”

Lord Kilhenny looked up with interest for the first time. “Then who was he?”

“That’s what we hope the American embassy will find out,” Darcy said. “They’ll be sending pictures of him back to Chicago in hopes that someone there may recognize him. Also his fingerprints, just in case they’re on file.”

“Really?”

I could see a flicker of hope in his eyes.

“It shouldn’t be that hard to trace him,” I said. “How many millionaires can there be in America these days who can afford to pay cash for a castle and a racing stable? The depression hit them harder than us over there, didn’t it?”

“So the question is, who might have wanted him dead and come over here to kill him?” Princess Zamanska leaned forward, waving
a red-nailed finger at us. I don’t think she liked being left out of the conversation.

“Do you remember anyone coming from America to visit him recently?” Darcy asked. “Anyone he met who made him uneasy?”

Lord Kilhenny stared into the fire again. A log had just dropped into place, sending up a shower of sparks. “I wasn’t exactly part of his inner circle, you know. He and I hardly exchanged a word. And from my situation here, I couldn’t see anyone coming to the main gate. He might have had any number of visitors, except that his manservant claimed that he had none. And he certainly seldom went out, only in the motorcar or to the race meetings.”

“And he didn’t talk to anybody there?” Darcy asked. “You didn’t see any interactions where he was confrontational or wary?”

Lord Kilhenny shook his head. “He stayed well away from the other owners. Answered in one-syllable words if they approached him. Of course, from what we suspect now, he was betting on his own horses. Now I look back on it, I wonder if he was betting on them to lose sometimes. There were occasions when I could have sworn a horse should have won and it didn’t seem to me that the jockey was urging it on in the final stretch.”

“This shows he had a devious mentality,” Princess Zamanska said, “but it doesn’t seem relevant to his murder. Apart from people who put money on losing horses, there is not one person who would have been angry enough to seek his death.”

“Apart from me,” Lord Kilhenny said. “After the way he treated me, the way he tarnished my reputation like that, I could easily have killed him.”

“But you didn’t,” I said. “And I don’t believe you did this time either. Somebody has cleverly worked to make you look guilty.”

“So nobody came to visit that you know of. He never went out.” Darcy shook his head. “This is a ridiculous puzzle.”

I had been trying to collect my thoughts, to make the most of this opportunity to talk with Darcy’s father, just in case it was never
repeated. “Do you know if a professor from an American university came to visit him?” I asked. “Or a priest? Because they were both seen near the main gate.”

Lord Kilhenny nodded. “That’s right. There was an American professor. He said he had come to visit the dig and asked if there were any rooms for rent in the castle. I laughed and told him what I knew about Roach. He thanked me and went on his way.”

“That was all he asked you?”

“I didn’t exactly invite him in for a cup of tea,” he said. “He said something about the front gate being locked and I told him there was a telephone to the castle if he wanted to be admitted. And he asked if that was the only way in.”

“You didn’t tell him about the little door in the wall, did you?” Darcy asked.

“Of course not. Do you think I’m stupid?” he snapped, then seemed to collect himself. “No. I saw no reason to disclose that.”

“And the priest?” I asked. “A young priest asked about him. Did he come here?”

Lord Kilhenny shook his head, then he said, “Wait. There was someone. Not a priest, a doctor. About a month ago Roach wasn’t feeling well. A doctor was summoned, but not the local quack. In fact I rather think he was American. Mickey, his valet, told me that he was going to fetch the doctor. I asked if it was serious and Mickey said no, probably just a bad cold but Mr. Roach wanted to be sure. Then, later that day, I was coming from the garage, having just parked the estate wagon, when I overheard an exchange at the front of the house. Roach sounded rather put out. He said something like ‘How do you think they discovered?’ and there was some kind of answer in a deep voice that I didn’t quite catch. Then he said, ‘What now? I can’t go through an operation like that again. Once was bad enough.’ And then another reply and I came around the corner to see the doctor getting into the motorcar and Roach said, ‘Thanks
for telling me, although I’ve no doubt you’ll want to be well paid for coming to see me.’ And Mickey drove him off.”