Blood Royal Read Online Free Page B

out he wasn’t alone.
    Tony Dutton saw the movement when he crept out of his hiding place in Henry III’s tomb after midnight. He had spent a cramped and uncomfortable half dozen hours waiting for the cleaning crew to finish and leave. Westminster wasn’t just a cathedral where they crowned kings and queens, it was a damn indoor cemetery, with tombs and crypts and wherever else they stick dead people. No, those had not been pleasant hours, lying there, side by side with God knows who. There was a bronze likeness of the king, but Dutton didn’t know if that was old Harry himself dipped in bronze like a baby shoe or if it was an effigy of him. If nothing else he had just spent hours within kissing distance of King Henry’s death mask only to climb down and spot someone moving in the shadows.
    It was just a shadow—but a shadow that moved. Someone else was creeping around the Abbey at the witching hour and it scared the hell out of him. His heart and lungs suspended with pure shock as he stared into the darkness and tried to find the shadow that had moved.
    Was it a trap? Was I lured here to be killed? fuckfuckfuck. How stupid can I be, creeping around a place full of dead people for a story? Fuck my arse—I might end up the handiwork of a killer just to get a goddamn story.
    No self-respecting tabloid reporter expected to get hurt covering a story—it was part and parcel of a dishonorable profession that cowardice went along with the lying ink and personality assassination the reporters specialized in.
    That bastard Howler had told him he would find “the body of a crime” in the Abbey. He didn’t know exactly what the hell that meant, some sort of legal phrase, corpus delicti or some other Latin mumbo jumbo used by attorneys. It hadn’t occurred to him that “body” might mean there was a killer— and that he himself might be the victim.
    When he’d seen the movement, Dutton put his back to the wall and froze. He had been making his way along the aisle that ran along Edward the Confessor’s chapel. That was creepy, too. Edward might have been a saint who died in bed, but didn’t Shakespeare claim that Richard II was murdered in the chapel by an assassin, one hired by the next in line to the throne?
    He didn’t know where the “body of a crime” was—hell, he didn’t know who the body was or even what Howler had meant by his cryptic statement. Not that it would be unusual to have bodies in a graveyard. That’s what Westminster was, a big church with an indoor graveyard where Britain had dumped the remains of the high and mighty since before the Magna Carta.
    He stared into the darkness, but the other side of the cathedral was just a black pool. Did I see something? His heart had come alive, pounding against his chest wall, as pure fright made room for adrenaline.
    It had to be a fuckin’ graveyard that bastard lured me to.
    He hated graveyards. Even though he was well past the forty mark, he still held his breath every time he drove by one, still playing that game about not breathing in ghosts he learned as a kid. He didn’t really think he would breathe in ghosts, but … what the hell, he hated graveyards.
    Nothing moved in the dark pool. But he couldn’t have seen a movement if there had been one, it was too dark. In a moment the moon would pop out from behind clouds and bring a little light to the midnight interior. It had been a wet and nasty late afternoon, London gray and drizzling, when he came into the Abbey with the last of the tourists and stayed behind and hid. Now the rain had stopped but the north wind was pushing dark clouds past the moon, letting it peek out every couple minutes. Intermittent moon glow was the only light in the crown jewel of England’s religious past, the enormous Church of England cathedral where British sovereigns were still crowned. When the moon slipped out from under the cloud cover, it shone faintly through the cathedral’s mullion and colored glass windows