‘You work for The Family. I assumed they wouldn’t want it generally known that the Prince of Wales was the son of an unmarried Cornish housemaid and that the actual heir to the throne was still alive. With Billy dead, they will return to the situation they assumed they were all in anyway.’
‘Ah. I see. You assumed I worked for them. No, I only have one boss. I’m quite fond of him—he pays well.’ He pursed his lips and regarded him speculatively for a moment. ‘You had a brother, didn’t you? In fact, I believe you call yourself by his name.’
‘No, I corrected you, if you recall.’
‘But you know about the hatred that can exist between them—love and hate, two sides of the same coin.’ He didn’t reply, so the other man just shrugged lightly and continued, ‘It would all have been well if they’d not made him sell his island. We never came to it—hardly his cup of tea really. He had a friend with a much nicer island and we went there a lot. A younger set. More to do.’ He smirked slightly. ‘But it was the principle of the thing—that they made him sell it. That they dared to point a finger at him, at his behaviour, given all that they did and got away with.’
‘What did he do that forced the sale—do you know?’
Simon frowned. ‘I have no idea—well, no, I havesomeidea, but not enough to do anything useful with it.’
‘Genocide?’
He laughed. ‘Too much effort—have you seen him? But good guess.’
‘He knew about Billy?’
‘The old woman told him many years ago, apparently. She was his nanny. She was the one they’d paid to sort out the crisis when Her Majesty gave birth to a retard. So the nanny always knew, always made a big deal of him and ignored the older brother—as you said, the son of some servant here in Scilly. She despised him for that—but then so did Her Majesty. But my boss was only six when the nanny told him the story, and what do six year olds understand about shit? He probably would never have thought about it again. But he visited her when we came down to pack up the island.’
‘She had dementia.’
‘Maybe. Maybe not. I mean, she wasn’t wrong, was she? She was being visited by the king. She knew all those years that he was still alive—did you know that?’
‘No.’
‘I suggest you spare some of that bleeding heart you’re pretending to have over her. She got wind somehow that he was alive in the early ‘70s, left London and moved back down to the islands. She visited him, in that fucking place, I suppose. When the home closed, he seemed to know enough to go to her anyway. But all that time, all those years, she was collecting her fat pension to keep her mouth shut, and so she did and just left him in an asylum.’
‘So she told the younger brother when he made his final visit with her.’
‘She did, and he wasn’t in a very good mood at the time anyway. Would you be? Your older brother, who’s not your brother at all but the kid of some local slag, can order you around and he’s a complete disaster himself—affairs, divorce, and worse.’
‘You have not been subtle in your hunt for Billy.’
The water was too high now for Simon to sit comfortably, so he struggled to his feet, grimacing as the wire holding his wrist presumably tightened more. ‘Yeah, well, I’m in a bit of a hurry. She’s near the end—the queen. It’s not public knowledge, but we’ve all been told she probably doesn’t have more than a few weeks. If that. It’s hell of a lot of work for the family when it does happen, as you can imagine. They’ve got to get all those medals out and polish them, for a start. So, anyway, in a few days we might have a king.’
‘Uh huh. But it will be the wrong one.’
‘Yes, the wrong one. This is my prince’s one chance. Do you know what’s really funny about all of this?’
‘No, why don’t you tell me.’
‘If we get rid of the pretender—and his kids are out of the line of succession as well obviously—and let’s just say for argument sake something happened to my boss—guess who’s next in line for the throne?’
Aleksey frowned, thinking about this, but finally admitted, ‘I don’t care.’
‘You should. It’s your wife—in her own right.’ He laughed. ‘Yeah, I thought you’d find that interesting. You could rethink that divorce then… King Nikolas the First? It has a nice ring. Sorry, King Aleksey the First. Even better.’
‘But your boss is hail and hearty, so that is redundant speculation.’
‘He is currently. I said I was fond of him because he pays well. I could become extremely fond of you too—hell, I’m feeling the love already.’
Aleksey smiled, genuinely entertained by this offer, and Simon’s jaw tensed. He wasn’t about to explain his amusement—but who would leave paradise voluntarily?
‘Your loss. I’ll be well set up whatever happens. But we need to produce Billy before the juggernaut of monarchy starts rolling. Once that happens, we won’t be able to stop it.’
‘You can’t possibly think Billy could be crowned king.’
‘Of course not. He doesn’t need to be. He’ll do his job—oust the dangerous fool—and then we’ll shuffle the little fucker off his mortal coil. Or put him in a cosy rest home if we’re feeling generous.’
