The drawing room was almost exactly the same as when Jon had left. After all, he had only been gone for maybe three minutes. Emeline and David were still frozen in a paused argument. Marjorie was still watching them with a glazed expression. Maud had clawed her way up the back of the nearest chaise longue and was still recovering from her assault. Matthew was standing there, not knowing what to do. The cats were still living their best lives by the fire.
At Jon’s entrance, they barely moved. At Martin’s entrance, only Maud made a sound as the young Prince rushed over to her. And then suddenly the room came alive as Tony Speck and Miss Darcy stepped in. At first the Royals seemed almost happy to see them, and then they saw that Speck was carrying a gun.
‘Speck? Miss Darcy? Where have you been?’ Marjorie asked.
They remained standing by the door, blocking the exit. This was an incredibly bad situation – Jon knew it, Martin knew it, and it was just starting to dawn on the wider room. Before Martin had run over, Speck had grabbed the folder and now held it like a grand prize.
Miss Darcy ignored Marjorie. She just stood there, with her arms behind her back, and that God-awful smile on her face. For someone so young, she inhabited the malice of millennia. ‘Why is everyone still up? It’s very much past everyone’s bedtime.’ She sounded like a nightmare warden of a children’s home.
‘What is the meaning of all this?’ David said, finally drawing his eyes away from Emeline – his daughter. ‘You’re blocking the door – it’s a little menacing.’
‘Jon,’ Emeline said, ‘did you find the person in the study?’
Jon glanced from her to Speck’s gun. Miss Darcy nodded to him. ‘Go on, investigator.’
‘We have been tricked,’ Jon said slowly, thinking that every word could have been his last. Miss Darcy and Speck were toying with them – the lions were now the mice being played with. ‘Your family crests have all had trackers placed on them. What I thought were heat signatures were really just the crests.’
Realisation dawned on Emeline’s face. ‘That means . . . ’
‘Yes,’ Jon said, ‘I think these two have been here the entire time.’
‘Would anybody mind catching us up?’ Tony Speck said. ‘This is the grand reveal of our great investigator, I assume?’
Jon refused to speak, so Emeline ended up giving a quick summation of what had been talked about. She still seemed to hold out some hope that Miss Darcy and Speck were here for friendly reasons. When she said that Matthew had killed Thomas Crockley, Miss Darcy nodded as if she’d already known, but when Emeline said that Maud had killed the King, Tony Speck snorted with derision.
‘Is that so?’ he mumbled. ‘Well, I’ll be.’ What a reaction to finding out that your king, the one you had sworn to protect, was dead.
‘Well done, Jon,’ Miss Darcy said. ‘I didn’t think you had it in you. Well, Maud, you will be handed over to police immediately when the blizzard breaks. Matthew, you as well. There is no room in the monarchy for naughtiness.’
‘Naughtiness?’ David said. ‘Naughtiness? Are you playing with us? What are you saying that for? They are murderers. We should be restraining them, locking them up, keeping them under surveillance until the police get here.’
‘You are under surveillance,’ Tony Speck said simply. ‘You have been under surveillance every moment since arriving at the castle.’
This took a moment to sink in. ‘What?’ said Marjorie.
‘Well, I didn’t keep it from anyone,’ said Speck matter-of-factly. ‘The new security system. I simply didn’t correct you when you made a mistake. You thought it was outside the castle. Rather, it was inside. We have cameras in every single room and trackers to easily track everyone’s movements. That’s how we already know everything that happened. We know that Maud poured venom into the whiskey, we know that Matthew killed his father, we know that David took this folder here from the pantry. So I took it back. I must have dropped it when I had to hurry to hide from you, Alleyne.’
‘I found it in the hall. I couldn’t believe my luck,’ Martin said, as if to confirm this.
Jon shot a look at David. The old man shrugged. ‘You almost caught me with it, butler. You thought you saw me slip something into my pocket, and I was cagey about it. That’s what I wanted you to see. It was easier for me to slip the folder back into my room. Simple misdirection. I didn’t have time to look in it then. And when I went back to my room – it had disappeared. Seeing as I had stolen it originally, I could hardly raise an alarm about it.’
Jon didn’t care. ‘If you saw all of this, why didn’t you stop it?’ He said this towards Speck, but really it was more to Darcy.
Something Speck had said out in the corridor stuck out to him – You have ruined everything. There was something else – something final that he was missing. Why did he think it was back in the King’s medical notes . . . ?
‘Let us see what was in the folder then. All of your secrets, yes? Sounds juicy. Let us see your ruination.’ Speck opened the folder and tipped the contents all over the floor. Sheets upon sheets of paper fell out and scattered. Eyes followed every single one, but there was no need. They were all exactly the same. They were all entirely blank. ‘Seems like the King played you all. Just to see how turgid you all are. He never had any evidence.’
Eyes darted across the pile of blank papers. A realisation set in to each and every one of them. The folder was empty. Nothing. Their secrets had been revealed by none other than themselves.
They must have all looked a picture, as Tony Speck started to laugh, but after the final piece of paper fluttered out he was confused. He grunted like a caveman and turned the folder in his hands. ‘There was meant to be one thing of note in here.’
Martin laughed and held a swath of papers up. ‘Do you mean this?’
‘You little bastard.’ Speck started advancing towards Martin.
‘This is the King’s speech, right? The speech he was going to give to us?’ Martin said, dodging out the way of Speck’s grasp. ‘The one that’s going to tell us who is the next king?’
There was a soft murmur through the remaining Royals. Even after everything, they were still so bloody interested in who was to get the Crown next.
Speck cornered Martin so he couldn’t run away and reached for him.
‘Tony, stand down,’ commanded Miss Darcy. ‘The damage has been done. I have been thinking that maybe everyone here deserves to hear the speech anyhow.’
The confusion was palpable as the muscleman wheeled around to her. ‘Are you sure? That is a change of . . . ’
‘Just let them read it, Tony. It is time they all understood. This has gone on long enough.’
‘Fair enough, boss. Marty, why don’t you read your little speech out for the whole class?’
Prince Martin held up the papers and started to read, before Speck interrupted, ‘Wait. Actually, how about you let Alleyne read it? The poor chef must be feeling rather useless about now. After all, he has been prancing around all day playing detective, and it seems all his working out was wrong.’
Wrong. Wrong. Was he still getting it wrong? Still one final doll to break through so he could see the sky.
Prince Martin did not quarrel with Speck, he merely plodded over to Jon and handed him the sheets of paper, before returning to his original position. Jon thumbed through the sheets – typed up on the King’s typewriter. Eric thought it gave a speech an air of occasion if it was typed on a typewriter. Jon automatically started to read passages that jumped out at him, and before he knew it he was enraptured in the voice of the King, speaking to him from beyond the grave.
‘Well?’
Jon shook himself somewhat. The room was looking back at him, expectation weighing everyone down. From what Jon had just read, he thought they would not like what they heard, and he would not like the painful truth that this speech would unearth. Something was still horribly wrong here, and for some reason, he knew the identity of ‘what’ was locked within these pages.
He looked to Miss Darcy and Tony Speck, still projecting a powerful unity, and they nodded almost in sync.
Jon cleared his throat and began to read.