Half past midnight is nary time for a denouement. By that time, one should be cosily wrapped up bed, in the throes of a pleasant dream. Most of Great Britain was, but the souls of Balmoral Castle were not permitted sleep, and only nightmares stalked the halls.
The influx of confused faces entering the drawing room told Jon that no one living had guidance for him – all he saw painted on there was pain, loss, and anger. It was seemingly an eternal truth that some of that anger was pointed towards him.
‘I am starting to feel an odd kinship towards the humble sheep,’ David spat, and upon seeing Jon, gleefully added, ‘I am assuming that makes you our sheepdog, doesn’t it, butler?’ He guided Marjorie over to the seating area in front of the fire – where Jon had just risen from – and sat her down with an almost paternal force. Jon had to step back at David’s scowl, as he completed his task and rounded on him again. The weight of the occasion dragged them both down. ‘You know, I am starting to wonder if Miss Darcy doesn’t have a point and you are just playing around with all of us for your sick enjoyment.’
‘Hear, hear,’ said Marjorie, forcing the words through her ever-present alcoholic mist. It seemed the matriarch had used her time since they had all parted to do nothing but accelerate her drinking. She must have found some more alcohol beyond the drawing room in the interim.
‘Uncle,’ Emeline snapped, stepping away from her sister and her nephew. ‘This is not the time for vendettas. Another tragedy has befallen us, and those of us’ – she mouthed the next word, ‘remaining,’ before returning to her usual diction – ‘must remain steadfast. Thomas has . . . ’ She glanced at her twin sister and fell silent.
Everyone knew. There wasn’t much of an outpouring of grief. It wasn’t exactly the same as the King’s passing. If Jon didn’t already have a good idea who was the culprit to both killings, he would have had a hard time discerning anything usable.
Rather than remaining steadfast, David rounded on Emeline in complete disobedience as Maud provided a backing of sobs and wails. ‘I am very sorry to hear about what happened to Crockley, but it is almost irrelevant. That common crabstick of a man was not fit to be in the same room as the King, let alone sully one of the halls with his own blood.’ Maud’s sobs and wails became ever so slightly more prominent in the face of this.
Emeline retaliated. ‘Uncle, I have been holding back from speaking my mind because it is not the proper way to do things, but let me hold back no further. You are absolutely the most disgusting creature I’ve ever met in all of my thirty-nine years. You are abhorrent, cruel, cowardly, a shell of what my father was. The fact that Windsor blood runs through my veins fills me with pride, but the fact that I share that with you almost makes me want to throw it all away. How Miss Darcy and the establishment at large have not forced Father to throw you out onto the street is beyond my comprehension.’
‘Please!’ Maud shrieked. ‘Stop it now. My Thomas is dead, Daddy is dead, we must get to the bottom of this before anything else happens!’
Marjorie exuded a little titter on the settee, and attention was once again on her. She seemed to grow at every pair of eyes that fell on her. ‘Your Thomas . . . He was a cardboard man – a light breeze could blow his morals down. He does not deserve to share a thing with my husband, even if that thing is death.’
‘You can say what you want about Thomas, Mummy,’ Maud seethed, her tears steaming, ‘but I did grow to love him. If you wished for something else for me, maybe you should have spoken up in the past, instead of lounging back and critiquing it.’
‘It’s so easy to be young,’ Marjorie critiqued. ‘All that fire and no worry of getting burned. I am here to tell you, daughter, that that fire will come back to claim you in time.’
‘Wait, where is Martin?’ Maud said. ‘Where is my son?’
‘He went to get a glass of water, Mum,’ Matthew said, his arm around her. ‘You remember – he told us?’
‘Going senile in your old age, daughter?’ Marjorie snorted.
‘Shut up!’ This was Matthew. It was so sharp and unexpected that Marjorie launched an instinctual tirade of abuse back at him.
‘Stop this, Mother. Matthew. Maud. Everyone!’ Emeline shouted. ‘This does not help us. This has gone on long enough. Jon, please, you have summoned us here – do you have a final verdict?’
Jon would have happily never said a word for the rest of his life if he had been allowed to not say the next one. ‘Yes. I believe I know who killed the King.’
The room dropped a few degrees. The only sound was the synchronised cats purring by the fire. Emeline guided her sister over to the left chaise longue and sat her down. Matthew did too. As if it were mandated, David and Marjorie came to sit on the right.
‘Okay then, butler,’ David said, all his sarcasm merely implied. ‘Let us hear it.’
Jon did not even hesitate. He began. ‘We all know what brings us here tonight. The King is dead. He died right here, on the coffee table we are all gathered around now. I think you will all agree that the manner of his death was very odd. In fact, he was murdered – murdered by ingesting poison, poison that was in that very whiskey.’
He pointed to the decanter half-full of the tainted whiskey.
‘But,’ David said, ‘Miss Darcy said that my brother died naturally.’
‘Are you really that naïve, David?’ Marjorie snapped. The old man went white at his partner in snippiness betraying him. ‘Tharigold is talking out of her arse. Even I can see that.’
‘Continue, Jon,’ Emeline said.
‘We quickly ascertained that I was to investigate this matter, because the whiskey was unsealed only in this room, and the only people who had cause to poison it was one of you. I couldn’t accept it at first, but I have come to see throughout the day that one indeed was able to bring it within themselves to do it.
‘You all have motive for the King’s murder, and that muddied the waters somewhat. I still could not see who had the most reason to dispatch the King, particularly just before his speech, which was going to announce who was to be the next monarch. We know that, from the updated succession rules, it could have been one of four of you. Princess Emeline. Princess Maud. Prince Matthew. Prince Martin. But I could not discount you two – Princess Royal Marjorie and Prince David – from the investigation either.
‘I admit I did not know what to do after the private audiences. In fact, I did not know what to do until not long ago. Prince Martin and I were searching separately, and then together. Prince Martin had been tasked with hiding this elusive folder you have all mentioned. The King gave it to him, and he hid it in the pantry. That is where we met and where we happened upon a tragedy in the adjoining wine cellar. Thomas Crockley – dead.
‘By all accounts, it appeared as though Thomas Crockley had died by suicide. He had drunk a vial of poison, taken from the stash of jam jars of poison in the secret compartment in the drinks cabinet nearby. Thomas was collapsed against a wine rack, with a look of anguish on his face, with blood pooled around his head, very much looking as though he had vomited it up. I believed Thomas Crockley had killed the King and then, when he realised I was close to figuring it out, he took his own life.’
‘Well,’ Marjorie said. ‘There we are then.’
‘No. It was perfect. A little too perfect. I started thinking about other options, different possibilities. Something just didn’t make sense. If Crockley had known the extent of the poison, why would he have performed CPR on the King? He put his lips to the King’s, he could have killed himself. Even more so, because in updated CPR, you are not even supposed to blow through the mouth. Crockley was so desperate to save the King that he did it anyway.
‘So, what if Thomas Crockley was murdered by the same assailant who killed the King? Crockley had been outside for a smoke. He had then come back to the pantry, because he wanted another. I had told him earlier in the day that there was a box of firelighters in the pantry if he needed a light. There, I think he must have happened upon the murderer making sure their stash had not been disturbed. I think Crockley threatened to unmask them, and the only course of action for this unknown was to kill Crockley. It seemed like Crockley was bleeding from the mouth, but only because of the angle at which he lay. I think the murderer lay him like that on purpose. I think, had I moved the body, I would have found that Crockley had been stabbed in the back with a fire poker. They left the weapon in him so as to minimise blood flowing out, but then had to conceal the weapon. So they backed him into a place where they could slot the poker. Like a wine rack. The blood trickled only where it could, to the floor around Crockley’s face – making it look as though he had vomited blood.’
‘That’s rather ingenious, Jon,’ Emeline said, impressed.
Jon ignored her. ‘So next I had to ask myself, who? Which I got to through the question – why? Why would the murderer be in the pantry and the adjoining wine cellar? And then I realised, maybe it was to search for the folder of all of the family’s sins. Where had the folder gone? Martin had hidden it in the pantry, as I said.
‘Then I wondered – could anybody have known that? Well, there was really only one person. One person who’d had ample opportunity throughout the day to learn that. There is only one person who could have known that Prince Martin had hidden the folder there, and one person who knew him well enough to know that he most likely had. This one person had not only seen his short conversation with the King, they had seen Martin come out of the pantry this morning, and they had walked in on my private audience with Martin where he was being cagey about the pantry.
‘Isn’t that right, Prince Matthew?’
‘What?’ Matthew scoffed as all eyes fell on him. The young man sprang up in something like disgust. ‘I don’t believe this. I’ve stood up for you all day, Jon, and this is how you repay me?’
‘Tell me I’m wrong then, Matthew.’
Matthew’s angry gaze broke like the break of day. He glanced to his family and back to Jon. He had realised that it was futile.
‘Tell me I’m wrong,’ Jon said, pleading. ‘Please.’