Jonathan Alleyne had experienced many events in his life that might be labelled that age-old clichéd adjective ‘earth-shattering.’ One was when he stood in the back office of Caribbean Plaza and Eric Windsor properly introduced himself. Another was when one of his distant cousins contacted him a few years back to say that Gran had finally passed. A big one was sitting in the doctor’s office just recently as the doctor said many words he couldn’t understand and one he could only wish he didn’t. As Jon studied the timetable, he felt the same shaking feeling that might resemble the earth shattering.
Every single member of the Royal Family had been alone with the whiskey between the time it had been unsealed and the dinner. What was more, the drawing room had never been empty, and Tony Speck had not been present. Neither had anyone else – Matthew’s phantom assassin was nowhere to be seen, although Jon already knew they wouldn’t be.
It was one of them.
One member of the Royal Family was a murderer. That meant a lot of things, but perhaps the most pressing was that the other six members of the Royal Family could be in mortal danger.
Jon stepped forward. They deserved to know, even if it meant alerting the guilty party as well. What he was going to say was to be decided by the Gods, as he opened his mouth with no plan.
‘I need everyone’s attention.’ Emeline had stepped forward as well. She addressed the room in the commanding way only a daughter of the Crown could and indicated the two other culprits of the conversation. Princess Emeline, as the firstborn (having arrived a full three minutes before her twin sister), had been first in line for the throne before the succession-rule shake-up. If Emeline had become queen, Jon knew she would have been a formidable one. ‘We’ve been conversing whilst on my father’s final journey. I think we all need to put our cards upon the table.’
Jon and Matthew stole a glance. This was what the Princess had been stewing over as she strode ahead?
‘Now this may be difficult for some of us to accept, but times have taken the worst of turns. My father, our King, is dead. All signs appear to point to him being murdered. We only know facts. We all saw him – he started his speech, he took a sip of whiskey, and then he started to choke. He frothed at the mouth and clutched his throat before collapsing. I anticipate that he was dead before he hit the coffee table.’ She said all of this as though she were addressing the nation – coldly, emotionlessly conveying the information. ‘I think we need to discuss this and what we do now. It does not appear that the blizzard will stop anytime soon, the man tasked with protecting us is missing, and we have a predicament. In the absence of any rescue, or safety, or protector, we must proceed as if none will materialise at all.’
‘What are you trying to say, daughter?’ Marjorie snapped. She had resumed drinking, masterfully negotiating the glass with her bandage.
Emeline looked to Jon, which meant that everyone else did too. ‘Jon, I believe you are seeing more here than any other of us can. You are on the outside looking in; tell us what you see.’
‘I . . . think . . . well, I . . . ’ Jon had gotten over his nervousness at addressing the Royal Family quickly when he’d started working with them. Now it came flooding back. They were all looking to him expectantly – maybe even anticipating good news. ‘I have reason to believe that the King was murdered by someone in this room.’
Silence. One could hear the field mice breathing in their homes under the snow. The wind whistled outside. The faces of the Royal Family were frozen in confusion, all eyes dropped to the floor. Only Emeline met Jon’s gaze – she had come to the same conclusion.
Marjorie broke the horrible quiet. ‘How dare you speak such nonsense, you wretch!’
‘Mother,’ Emeline boomed. ‘Jon speaks the truth. If we do not listen, we might as well just be consumed by grief or, worse, go back to exactly what we were doing – which in your case is drinking yourself into an early grave, although you seem pretty happy about that.’
‘There’s nothing about my grave that would be early,’ Marjorie said with that familiar venom. Maybe the Princess Royal had used some of that venom to kill the King, although after her layered (to say the least) reaction, Jon found that unlikely. When he thought about it, her reaction might have been the most genuine – complex in its robustness as all human emotion was meant to be. ‘In fact, I feel my grave would be incredibly timely, just as today has demonstrated.’
‘Yes, Mother, but the King’s death was not a natural occurrence. He was murdered – quite probably by one of us here in this room.’
A cold shiver passed through Jon and continued through everyone else. It was so tangible that it threatened to extinguish the newly licking fire.
‘You can’t possibly think that to be the case,’ David moaned. ‘Why would any of us have cause to hurt my brother? At least within the family.’ He turned to Jon with a look of violent malice.
‘I wouldn’t know who would hurt my father, Uncle. But I do know that only one of us here is already a criminal,’ Emmeline said.
‘The allegations were withdrawn!’ David exclaimed, and it was Marjorie’s turn to hold him.
‘Withdrawn?’ Maud relinquished her son and stood. ‘And how have they been withdrawn, Uncle, hmm? I’m sure quietly and politely and not without the promise of sizable compensation, either by you or the British government.’
David made a sound that could only be described as a frustrated squawk. ‘That is tantamount to treason, Maud. What a poor judge of anything you are, niece – seeing shadows on the wall when none are there.’
‘Please,’ Emeline commanded, and the others fell quiet again. ‘Jon, may you continue?’
Jon did not want to in the slightest, but he knew he must. The eyes of everyone in the room threatened to bowl him over as he spoke. ‘I am not accusing anyone out of malice. I am just looking at the situation as plainly as possible. It all comes down to the whiskey – which I think we can all agree is the murder weapon here. The King took a sip of whiskey, and within a minute he was dead. He had shown no prior complaints of being ill, or said he was as such. In fact, he was in great spirits before his drink.
‘So if we move forward with the idea that the whiskey was poisoned, where does that take us? I unpacked the whiskey from the Christmas shipment myself. I placed the bottles of Anchor Haven in the pantry. They were all sealed and stored in their usual place. This morning, on the way to attending to the fire for Prince David, I picked a bottle at random. They were all the same, I had no need to select a specific one. It was still sealed. Once I got to the drawing room, I cracked open the seal on the whiskey. It was so loud I would venture that Prince David even heard it.’
David, now the subject of stares, reluctantly nodded that he did and then hurriedly said, ‘That doesn’t mean anything.’
Jon continued, ‘I poured the whiskey into the decanter as the King likes me to do a few hours before consumption. The decanter then sat on the table in this room until I picked it up to start serving before the King’s speech. We have a window of opportunity where the whiskey could have been laced with a poison.
‘While myself, Prince Matthew, and Princess Emeline took the King to his bedroom, I asked Princess Maud to collate a timetable of sorts – a timetable that would show the comings and goings of this room in the run-up to Christmas dinner.’
‘So that’s what you were doing, Maud, with your questions?’ Marjorie sneered, sounding utterly betrayed.
‘Silence, Mummy,’ Maud said.
‘This is the timetable,’ Jon said, holding up the notepad. ‘You may all look at it if you like. Unfortunately, it shows that every single one of you was alone at some point and had ample time to lace the Anchor Haven. Furthermore, if you have all been truthful, it absolves Tony Speck from any suspicion, as no one mentioned anything about him being anywhere near the drawing room at any point.’
‘The dinner,’ David said, thrusting a finger into the air in a ‘eureka’ gesture. ‘The whiskey was alone during the dinner. We were all in the dining room. Speck, or some intruder, could have laced the whiskey then.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ Jon said, and he was afraid. What he would not give for an assassin right now. ‘I was outside the doors, and when I was not, I was busy in the kitchen with the meal. I understand that you have to take some of that at face value, but there we are. As for the other options, Tony Speck was with me for some of the meal, outside the doors. When he appeared and departed, he went the opposite direction to that of the drawing room. On the subject of an intruder, or anyone else in the castle who is not meant to be, that is also impossible. Speck showed me the interface for his new security system – an interactive map of all our heat signatures at the time of the dinner. We were all red dots. Nine. No more and no less. In the whole castle, and the grounds.’
Once Jon had finished, an uncomfortable quiet fell upon the room. Stolen glances and open mouths were as rampant as the snow outside.
Emeline stepped towards Jon. ‘Thank you, Jon.’ She did not seem as shocked as everyone else, as though Jon had merely been reporting her thoughts all along. ‘I hope we all see what kind of predicament we are all in. It does seem that one of us killed King Eric Windsor, our own flesh and blood. Only one of us here has any hope for something akin to an outsider’s perspective. And he has already demonstrated, just this moment, that he is up to the task.’
Jon saw where Emeline was leading everyone just before she said it. And the earth shattered again as Emeline said –
‘That is why, until more qualified people appear to save us, I think Jon should lead an investigation.’