Murder Most Royal — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

However, her room was large, the bed was comfortable, and anything could beat the tiny boxes they had given her in the army.

The job took longer than expected. She lost track of time but knew it must be around midnight. The playlist of Fela Kuti and Nina Simone playing quietly on her phone in the background had repeated itself at least a dozen times. The wind was up tonight and something outside was flapping with a dull, irregular rhythm. Distracted, she pictured ropes loosening. It took her back to her army days, when everything had to be battened down tight.

Eventually, she couldn’t bear the distraction any longer. She took the heaviest torch she could find in a cupboard in the hall, grabbed her coat, shoved her feet into the first boots that would fit and went out to investigate.

The lodge shared a garden with a little cottage that had once been used by the servants of the royal guests. Rozie knew it had been given to the bean counter while he looked for somewhere more permanent. She had tried twice, now, to talk to him about his story of the scuffle in the car park, but either he wasn’t at home or he was avoiding her.

Rozie remembered the way he had stared at her at the shoot. She hadn’t been worried at the time; now things were more complicated.

The noise seemed to be coming from an open lean-to with a cast-iron roof attached to the cottage. Shining her torch inside, Rozie saw that it housed some rusting garden equipment, a small boat under canvas and a vehicle under a plastic tarpaulin.

The problem was obvious: the tarpaulin had come loose on one side. Rozie wondered why the frantic flapping sound didn’t drive Cassidy as mad as it was driving her. The sweep of her torchlight revealed a bungee cord lying on the ground that must have been used to hold the cover down, stretched under the car from one side to the other. Without it, the loose plastic revealed a modern Land Rover Freelander four-wheel drive.

The headlights of a distant car lit up the treetops as it approached.

Rozie could hear its engine above the wind. She reached into her coat pocket for her phone to take a picture of the damage – but her hand found nothing. The car drew closer. Her phone, meanwhile, must be on the dining table where she had left it, playing ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ to an empty room.

Except, he didn’t come. Rozie noticed for the first time that the back door to the cottage was wide open. A thin light poured out from an inner room.