Barnaby looked left.
His stride didn’t break. His jaw tightened and he fixed his gaze on a point somewhere past the crowd.
The woman with the sign let out a noise that was somewhere between a gasp and a kettle reaching boiling point. Beside her, two girls in their twenties clutched each other’s arms and produced a sound so high-pitched that Florence would have lost her mind if she’d been present. A third was already filming on her mobile, arm extended, moving with them as they walked.
“BLEX!” one of the girls shouted. “Oh my God, BLEX!”
Lex grinned. He raised a hand, and the small cluster erupted as though he’d just walked out at Wembley.
“Hi! Hello. Yeah, cheers. Thank you.”
Barnaby smiled. It was tight and controlled. It communicated warmth without inviting further engagement, which Lex attributed to either decades of aristocratic training, or a personality disorder.
James, between them, kept walking. He lifted a hand to the small crowd and then his protection detail closed around him and guided him toward his waiting car. The transition was seamless. One moment he was a man in a polo shirt walking out of a school. The next he was being absorbed into the back seat of a black Range Rover, and the equerry was pulling the door shut behind him.
The girls surged forward. Not toward the King’s departing car, but toward Lex.
“Can we get a photo? Please? We’ve been here since half ten!”
“Go on then.” Lex stopped. Barnaby kept walking for three paces before he realised he was alone. The photos were taken quickly. Two girls on either side, mobiles held high, the school building behind them. Then the woman with the sign pushed forward, beaming, and pressed a sheaf of papers into Lex’s hands. They were warm from being gripped in her hands for too long.
“These are for both of you,” she said. “From the community. Fan art and letters. There’s one in there from my daughter, she’seight, she drew you boxing a horse, it’s not…it’s meant to be Barnaby on a horse and you’re boxingnextto it, the perspective’s a bit. Anyway, she loves you both.”
“That’s…yeah, that’s lovely, thank you!”
More papers were being produced from bags and jacket pockets, thrust at him in a growing stack that he couldn’t hold and still shake hands. Benton materialised at his elbow. He lifted the stack from Lex’s arms and tucked it under his own, like a butler receiving the post.
“I’ll see these are looked after, Mr Murphy.”
“Cheers, Benton.”
Barnaby was already crossing the car park toward his own car, hands behind his back and his spine rigid. He didn’t look back at the crowd. He didn’t wave. He unlocked his Audi with a click of the fob and was inside it before the girls had finished filming.
Lex jogged to his own car, lifted a hand to the last of the stragglers, and pulled away from the kerb. The A12 was backed up past Bow, so he cut south through Stratford and picked up the Westway to join the King of the United Kingdom and his marquess best friend at Kensington Palace.
Chapter Twenty-Four
KensingtonPalace was not, despite what tourists believed, a single building. It was a sprawl of apartments and courtyards and state rooms connected by corridors that hadn’t been meaningfully updated since Victoria decided she’d rather live somewhere else. James’s private apartments were in the south wing, accessed through a side entrance guarded by two Metropolitan Police officers who nodded at Barnaby and ran their gaze over Lex.
Lex had not spoken since the entrance hall. His mouth was open. His eyes were travelling across the ceiling, which was gilded and painted with allegorical figures. Barnaby followed his gaze upward. The painted sky was deep cobalt, threaded with gold leaf, and the figures had been sharpened by the restoration work recently done on it. It really was gorgeous. He’d forgotten.
“Close your mouth, Lex.” Lex closed his mouth. He opened it again three seconds later when they turned a corner and encountered an eight-foot portrait of George III in fullcoronation regalia. “And avert your eyes. All the gilt can get a bit much.”
“There’s a bloke on a horse on the ceiling, Barns.”
“That’s William III. He’s been there since 1700.”
They passed through a set of double doors held open by a page, down a corridor lined with paintings. Lex walked with the careful, wide-legged caution of someone terrified of destroying something that cost more than his flat.
James’s sitting room was at the end of the corridor. It was the one room in the apartment that felt lived-in rather than curated, featuring deep sofas in faded blue linen, a coffee table stacked with books and briefing papers, and a rug that had been walked on by enough protection officers and Jack Russells to have lost its original pattern. The windows looked out over the gardens, and the late afternoon light came in grey and even through the glass.
An afternoon tea had been laid on the low table, with a cafetière beside it for anyone who preferred coffee. Lex went at it immediately. He dropped onto the sofa, pulled the sandwich stand toward him, and ate two egg and cress triangles in the time it took Barnaby to sit down.
James was not eating. He was standing at a side table near the window, where Benton had deposited the armload of fan offerings collected outside the school. There were letters, drawings, printed images, and a handmade card shedding an alarming quantity of glitter onto the mahogany. James was flicking through the stack with the attention he typically reserved for documents from his red box.
Barnaby registered the danger of this a fraction too late.
James had stopped flicking through the pile. He was holding a single sheet of paper, A4, printed on both sides, the text dense and tightly packed. His hazel eyes moved across the first paragraph and his mouth twitched.
