Princess: A Private Novel Read online

  Knight began to laugh, but the sound died in his throat as Hooligan tapped at his keyboard and the contents of the USB stick flashed up onto a big screen.

  “Not good, is it?” Hooligan said.

  Knight shook his head. “No, it’s not.”

  “It gets worse.”

  Hooligan hit play on a video. Knight’s jaw dropped.

  Revealed on the screen, in graphic detail, was the reason for Sir Tony’s death.

  Chapter 16

  JACK MORGAN SHOWERED quickly, feeling underdressed as he pulled on a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt. The American wasn’t certain what you were supposed to wear to breakfast with a princess, but he was fairly certain that it wasn’t the rumpled clothing from his travel bag.

  Morgan found Sharon Lewis waiting on the other side of the door. “You didn’t tell me she was here.”

  “It’s your job to tell me things, Morgan, so that I can pass them on to her. This is a one-way system until she says otherwise.”

  Morgan didn’t bother to press the issue. He could see that Lewis was dedicated and loyal to Princess Caroline to a fault—unless the royal said jump, Lewis would stand in front of an oncoming truck.

  “Have you been with her long?” he asked as they walked through the barn conversion. Aside from the cameras and bulletproof glass, it could have been any other home in the countryside.

  “Five years,” Lewis answered proudly.

  “That’s a long time to be in the same detail.”

  “I asked to stay.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve worked with a lot of politicians, and a few royals. Princess Caroline’s different.”

  “Different how?”

  Lewis came to a stop. “The kitchen’s in there. Go ahead.”

  “Do I bow?”

  Lewis laughed, but said nothing. Morgan walked inside. If he was expecting silverware, waiters and a stuffed boar on the table, he was to be disappointed. Princess Caroline stood at a breakfast bar. She wore yoga pants and a hoody, and was pouring herself a bowl of cereal.

  “Morning, Jack.” The royal smiled. “Help yourself to cereal, or there are bacon and eggs in the fridge. I could make you some, if you’d like?”

  Morgan’s appetite had been stoked by his workout, but even had he been full, he would not turn down the chance to eat bacon and eggs cooked by the potential future monarch of the United Kingdom.

  “Bacon and eggs sounds great, Your Highness. Thank you.” Morgan wondered if anyone had ever uttered those words before, thinking of what a story this would make for his grandchildren—should he live to have any.

  Perhaps Princess Caroline read his thoughts. “You had an eventful night,” she said simply, laying the bacon into a pan where it sizzled and spat.

  “Not the greatest room service,” Morgan said, trying to make light of it.

  “I’m sorry that happened to you, Jack. I really have no idea why.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I don’t.”

  Morgan held his tongue. The kitchen was quiet but for the sound of the bacon frying.

  “Do you still want the job?” Caroline asked eventually.

  Morgan was taken aback. Despite the danger, he had not for one second thought about backing away from the mission. “Of course.”

  Caroline appeared relieved. “Then I’m sending Lewis to work with you. She’s a Welsh speaker, Jack, and that could be useful. She can also legally carry a firearm.”

  After last night’s attack, a firearm on Morgan’s side could be more than useful.

  “How do you like your eggs?” she asked.

  “Scrambled,” Morgan answered, before pulling the conversation back on course. “Your Highness, somebody fired seventeen bullets into my room last night.”

  “The police are investigating,” she assured him quickly.

  “I’m sure they are, but people don’t get shot at because they’re out looking for a young woman who liked to party a little too much—even if she is the friend of a princess.”

  He let the statement hang in the air, and with it the implied question—what wasn’t he being told?

  The Princess broke her eyes from the American and turned back to the cooker top. For a few quiet minutes she stirred eggs in a pot, then slid the bacon and eggs onto a plate, which she placed on the breakfast bar in front of her guest.

  “Eat up, Jack. It’s going to be a long day.”

  Chapter 17

  THE DRIVE TO Brecon was quiet. They took the Range Rover, Cook behind the wheel with Lewis riding shotgun, where she would be in the best position to react to any attack. In the back seat, Morgan regularly looked over his shoulders, but saw no sign of a tail—the winding roads of the Brecon Beacons, combined with the light traffic, made it difficult terrain to follow and remain inconspicuous. It would be different once they reached the town. That would be where they were at their most vulnerable, but it was where they had to go.

  Despite the attack of the previous night, the team would still split into two: Morgan and Lewis to meet Sophie’s parents on the town’s outskirts, and Cook to track down possible friends in the town center. Morgan considered changing the plan and keeping everyone together, but Cook convinced him not to.

  “They took a swipe at you in a quiet hotel in the middle of the night,” she explained. “I’m going to be in a town center with witnesses and police around. I served in Afghanistan,” the former soldier reminded him, “I can handle Brecon.”

  Morgan relented. The truth was, in a missing-persons case, every second was vital. Keeping the team together meant doubling the time to work the same leads, and that time was a luxury Sophie Edwards may not have.

  The Range Rover came to a halt and Morgan took Cook’s place behind the wheel. “You don’t leave the town center,” he repeated to her.

  “Think about your own safety, Jack. It wasn’t me who ended up in the ceiling.”

  Morgan was thinking of his own safety, fully aware that if Lewis had been the one to shoot up the hotel room, then he could be dead before he ever reached Sophie’s parents’ house. Prepared for such an eventuality, he was ready to hit the brake hard if he saw the officer move to draw her weapon. He hoped that would buy him the split second needed to pull out the steak knife he had liberated from Princess Caroline’s kitchen, and which now resided inside his right boot. It was risky, but it was all he had. That, and putting his trust in Princess Caroline and her appointed officer.

  “Have you met Sophie?” he asked Lewis as they drove on.

  “I have.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “She was the Princess’s friend, not mine.”

  “You’re a police officer. You’re observant. What did you observe?”

  Lewis held her reply for a long moment, instead turning her eyes to the green hillsides that surrounded the town and the growing clouds above them. “It’s going to rain. So much for the good weather.”

  Morgan suppressed his frustration and kept his tone neutral. “Sophie, Lewis. What did you observe about her?”

  The police officer shook her head. “That she got what she had coming,” she told him.

  “Why do you say that?” he pressed, but Lewis would offer no detail to back up her statement. Instead, the GPS announced their arrival at the home of Sophie’s parents.

  Frustrated and more wary of Lewis than ever, Morgan told her to wait in the car while he headed for the front door of a light-brick home set in a quintessential British middle-class estate.

  Morgan rang the bell. He saw shapes moving behind the glass, and then the door opened to reveal a short woman with jet-black hair, and large eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Mrs. Edwards?” Morgan guessed.

  “Yes?” she replied, eyebrows raising in wonder at his American accent.

  “Is Sophie home?”

  “Sophie?” Mrs. Edwards sounded confused by the question. “She hasn’t lived here for years. Can I ask who—”

  “My nam
e’s Jack Morgan, Mrs. Edwards. I’m a private investigator.”

  The woman in the doorway said nothing, but her face said it all. Morgan saw the first traces of fear and placed a calming hand on her shoulder.

  “May I come in?”

  Chapter 18

  PETER KNIGHT WAS searching for a parking spot on a busy London street when the call came through his car’s system. He saw Morgan’s name and answered.

  “Go ahead, Jack.”

  “I talked with Sophie’s parents.”

  Morgan’s tone suggested that the meeting had not proved fruitful, but Knight asked how it went anyway.

  “According to them,” Morgan answered, “Sophie went missing when she left for university. They said that she never got tired of telling them how much she hated it in Brecon.”

  “Any suspicion of the parents?” Knight asked.

  “No,” Morgan answered, trusting his gut. “They looked worn down by her, but that was about it. Both schoolteachers. Not the kind of people to have the connections to set a shooter loose.”

  “So they’re a dead end?”

  “They’re a dead end. Have you broken the news to Sir Tony’s daughter yet?” Morgan asked. Knight had forwarded him the contents of the USB stick. “That took some watching,” the American added. “It was hard to hold down my bacon and eggs.”

  Knight sighed as he finally found a place to park. “No. I’m just arriving now.”

  “I don’t envy you this one, Peter.”

  Knight let out a long sigh as he slotted the car into position and pulled on the handbrake. “It won’t be easy. Stay safe, Jack.”

  “Good luck.”

  Knight ended the call and stepped out into the street. One look at the clouds told him that the good weather was close to breaking. Complaining under his breath about the British summer, he walked the short distance to the home of Eliza Lightwood. He had called ahead, and she was working from home to accommodate his visit. The security guards in the apartment building buzzed him inside and escorted Knight to the lift.

  “Hello, Peter,” Eliza greeted him at the door. Her handshake was firm and she looked optimistic. “You have something?”

  “I do,” Knight confirmed. “Better I tell you in private.”

  Her eyes narrowed slightly. Then she led Peter inside her penthouse apartment.

  “Is it bad?” she asked, the slightest tremor of doubt in her voice.

  Knight nodded. There was no way to soften what had to be done, and so he came right out with it. “Eliza, your father was being blackmailed by a prostitute. The USB drive we found in your father’s room contained a graphic video that the blackmailer was threatening to share publicly.”

  If he had been expecting a dramatic reaction at the revelation, he didn’t get it.

  “Oh” was all that Eliza said.

  “I’ve seen it before with blackmail,” Knight said. “People don’t think they have a way out, so they choose death over—”

  “Shame?” Eliza finished for him, taking a seat as the dam of her strength finally showed signs of cracking. “That stupid old fool. I couldn’t have given a shit if he was sleeping with every prostitute in London. He was my dad.”

  Tears appeared in the corners of her eyes. Knight could see that the realization of her father’s suicide was finally hitting home. “Stupid old fool.” She sighed again.

  “I’m sorry, Eliza.”

  “It does seem clear now, doesn’t it?” She wiped the tears from her eyes. “I suppose you can put me in with all those other deluded people who just couldn’t accept the truth staring them in the face. I still can’t believe it. That he’d take his life over… a whore.”

  “Blackmail is a terrible crime. It pushes people into a corner.”

  “Who was it?” Eliza asked, her voice hardening.

  “We don’t know. The face of the woman in the video was obscured and there are no obvious clues.”

  She shook her head angrily. “You did your job, Peter. You proved to me my father committed suicide. You can close this case. Close this one, and open another… Find the bastards who blackmailed my father.”

  Chapter 19

  JANE COOK HAD mixed memories of Brecon. As a soldier she had often trained in the mountains, and those memories were of being cold, wet, hungry and tired—no, exhausted. But then there were the good memories. Memories of camaraderie. Memories of shared challenges, and shared victories. That was what Cook had loved about being a part of the army, and that was what she loved about being a part of Private.

  Cook had approached the Welsh market town as she would an Afghan one. That was not to say she sought out traps and ambushes—though she was vigilant—but that she talked in a friendly manner to shop owners, police officers and anyone who was happy to give her their time. She did not question these people directly on Sophie, but used her as bait, telling them she was visiting Brecon based on the recommendation of a university friend who had been born there. Inevitably, in such a small town, people would ask for the name of that friend.

  “Sophie Edwards,” Cook would tell them.

  “We know Sophie!” the two girls serving in the coffee shop told her, excited.

  “Such a small world, isn’t it?” the taller of the pair said.

  “We were in the same school year,” the shorter one explained. “Haven’t seen her since leaving day,” she added without prompting.

  “That must have been about the time she went off to London, and met you?”

  “I suppose it was,” Cook replied. “She didn’t waste any time leaving here, did she?”

  The shorter girl snorted. Her body language told Cook that although she knew Sophie, she might not have cared too much for her. “Well, she wouldn’t, would she? All we heard through school was how shit this town is, and how she was going to move to London and not come back.”

  “Really?” Cook said. “She always said how beautiful this place is.”

  “Not in school she didn’t,” the taller woman replied, adding the finishing touches to Cook’s coffee. “One pound fifty please.”

  Cook paid with a five and put the change in the tip jar.

  “Do you guys keep in touch with her?” she asked.

  The two young women shared a look. The taller one answered. “I don’t think anyone’s seen her since she left.”

  The other one shook her head. “She didn’t want anything to do with her life here. She wouldn’t even accept my Facebook friend request.”

  Cook’s first instinct was to smile at that statement, but then a thought hit her like a cold slap to the face. Where else would you search for a young woman in her twenties?

  Chapter 20

  JACK MORGAN PULLED the Range Rover to a stop outside the coffee shop. To avoid being a static target on the street, Cook had waited inside, her eyes on the door, an emergency exit route planned through the back, behind the counter. At a gesture from Morgan, she moved to join them.

  “Tell me something good,” the American asked of her, pulling out into the light traffic.

  “Sophie’s a ghost here,” she told him, confirming Morgan’s own experience at the parents’ house.

  Morgan nodded. “If she ran away from London, she didn’t come here. We’ll head back to…”

  “Llwynywermod,” Lewis finished, pronouncing the name of the royal residence for the American.

  “We’ll have the helicopter meet us there, and take us back to London.”

  “London?” Cook asked.

  “She’s not here. Next step is to see if she’s hiding, or being hidden, under everyone’s noses.”

  “I’m going through her social media to see if there are any clues on there,” Cook informed him.

  “HQ have already done that. There was nothing. No movements. No recent updates.”

  “I know,” she replied, “but there could be something else. A pattern, maybe. Something.”

  “OK,” Morgan allowed. “Follow your nose—”

  He was about to add
more when he saw Lewis looking anxiously behind them. “What is it?”

  “Black BMW. I’ve seen it three times today.”

  “Can you make out the plates?”

  “No. Too far back.”

  “I’ll pull over. See if you can get the plates as they go past.”

  Lewis nodded. Morgan noticed that her hand was on her pistol.

  He pulled the car onto the side of the road.

  “Shit,” Lewis growled. “They went up a side street.”

  “That’s a hell of a coincidence.”

  The police officer nodded. “He was following us.”

  Morgan pulled back onto the road. “At least we shook him.”

  He called in to Private London’s headquarters. “What’s the ETA on our security team?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Morgan,” the operative in the personnel department replied, “but all our agents are in the field.”

  “What about freelance contractors?” Morgan asked, confused. There were dozens of personal security companies that could be hired in these situations.

  “I’m afraid none of them are bidding on the contract,” the operative explained. “It’s really quite unusual, Mr. Morgan. I’ve never come across this before. I have no idea why no one is taking the job.”

  But Morgan had.

  The reason’s name was Michael Gibbon.

  Chapter 21

  MORGAN HUNG UP the call. He looked into the mirror, and Jane Cook’s eyes meet his.

  “It’s Flex, isn’t it?”

  Morgan nodded. Michael “Flex” Gibbon was a former SAS soldier who owned and operated one of the biggest private security companies in the country.

  He had also taken an embarrassing beating two years earlier at the hands of Morgan and Cook as they’d searched for Abbie Winchester. Flex had broken no laws when he’d facilitated the hiring of the men that carried out the kidnapping, but he had broken Morgan’s code. For that, he had suffered a ruptured knee, and now Morgan could see that Flex was enacting his revenge.

  “He’s blacklisted us with the other companies.”