The Heir Affair
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, incidents, and dialogue, except for incidental references to public figures, products, or services, are imaginary and are not intended to refer to any living persons or to disparage any company’s products or services.
Copyright © 2020 by Well Played, Inc.
Cover design by Elizabeth Turner Stokes
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First Edition: July 2020
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933671
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1591-8 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-1592-5 (ebook)
E3-20200507-DA-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Family Tree
ACT ONE CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ACT TWO CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
ACT THREE CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
ACT FOUR CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
Discover More
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
ALSO BY HEATHER COCKS AND JESSICA MORGAN
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To our mothers,
for their strength, their wisdom, and their love
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ACT ONE
A clear and innocent conscience fears nothing.
—Queen Elizabeth
CHAPTER ONE
Pardon me, lass, but could you help me with a wee spot of murder?”
I jumped. I hadn’t heard anyone enter the store. The peeling P. G. Wodehouse hardbacks I’d been alphabetizing tumbled onto the floor.
“Absolutely, just one second,” I said over my shoulder. Could I help with murder? Please. It had become my specialty. P. G. could wait.
I knelt, ostensibly to reorganize my pile of books so that I could return to it easily, but mostly to take a stabilizing breath. That had become my pattern: Whenever I had to interact with someone for longer than a moment, I caught myself pausing first, wondering whether that second of anonymity was my last. All it would take to blow my cover was one keen eye or ear. One person whose tabloid habit meant they’d recognize the contours of my face, one person to hear through the shaky upper-crust British accent I’d adopted. Assuming a new identity was thrilling, but the accompanying dread never fully went away.
My customer turned out to be a stooped older gent in a thin beige cotton cardigan, his hand wobbling on a cane, light age spots making a mosaic of his balding pate. Not the archetype of a Hello! addict, though if there’s anything I’ve learned over the last eight years, it’s that you can never tell. But from what I could see through my own (fake) glasses, there was no spark of recognition behind his.
“What precise kind of murder do you fancy?” I asked. “Real, or fictional?”
“I’ve always been a fan of the truth,” he said with a thump of his cane.
“Who isn’t?” I squawked, too loudly. MI6 was missing out on a once-in-a-generation talent. But his face was calm and open. No traces of double meaning. I smiled and added, “Follow me.”
The back of the bookstore was a tight warren of blond-wood shelves, and smelled invitingly of yellowed pages and sixty years of shopkeepers making themselves a cup of tea. Right now, we had ample secondhand Agatha Christies, and I’d spent my first day here working on an intricate window display paying tribute to her lesser works; a day later, after that engendered some buyer interest, I’d enlisted Nick to help me rearrange the whole Mysteries and Crimes section. I’d become an expert in every flavor of murder we had to offer.
“Have you read this?” I said, handing him Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me. “She worked with—”
“Ted Bundy,” he said, scoffing mildly. “Everyone’s read that one, love.”
“So I assume you’ve also read Helter Skelter, and In Cold Blood,” I said, poring through the shelves. We were in the section Nick called Enormously Famous American Murders (Brutal). He’d insisted on reorganizing the books first by where the murder happened, then by exceptionally specific genre, and then alphabetically. It had been a long night that nearly ended in Small-Town Royal Murder (Justified).
“Here’s a good one,” I said, scuttling past Assassinations and into Bloodless Crimes. “The Gardner Heist. No one dies, but there is a massive unsolved art theft.”
He chewed his lip, then nodded. “The wife does think I need a break from slashers.” He chuckled and zipped his cane through the air for emphasis.
I left him browsing the stacks, the book tucked under his arm, and took the long way back to finish up with my Wodehouse. Nick and I had gotten unbelievably lucky with this Airbnb, which allowed its tenants to live in a flat above the bookstore and run the business for the duration of their stay. It was typically full up years in advance—there are a lot of people in the world itching to play bookseller for a week—but there had been a last-minute cancellation. So after three weeks of skipping like pebbles across England, putting as much distance as we could between ourselves and the mess we’d left behind in London, we’d found a sanctuary: a short-term rental of what our lives might have been like if he’d been born plain old Nick, lover of bad snacks and worse TV, rather than Prince Nicholas, future king.
I ran my fingers idly across the spines of the books I passed. My twin sister, Lacey, had always hated used books; she wanted everything brand new, born into this world for her alone to make her mark on it. I’d never minded a little scruff. I liked that used books brought with them their own history—every dog-ear, every stain, every crease. Maybe a book was slightly faded because someone had left it in the sun on their honeymoon. Maybe page ninety-eight was turned at the c
orner because it contained a glorious insult, or the perfect romantic turn of phrase. Maybe the person who’d highlighted nearly every line had graduated at the top of her class. Secondhand books could have lived in tiny walk-ups or hotel rooms or the White House—or, here, even in Balmoral Castle itself. Each book was a mystery, its secrets hidden in plain sight.
Kind of like me.
Most shoppers in Wigtown, known officially as Scotland’s National Book Town, were so immersed in its bookstores that they barely looked at the human beings working in them. No one appeared to notice the beauty mark that to me seemed so obviously to be made of eyeliner; the fact that I could see the register better if I looked over, rather than through, the lenses in my matronly frames; or that I was, appropriately, wearing an actual wig. And whenever Nick joked that there might be a village somewhere called Booktown that specialized in wigs—which was often—no one realized they were laughing politely with the second in line to the throne. The store itself was part of our disguise.
My elderly murder aficionado eventually met me at the register with my recommendation and a couple of grim offerings from Creepy French Murders (Historical). I rang him up with the promise to set aside anything else obscure that came our way.
“Much obliged, Miss…?” He peered at me expectantly.
“Margot,” I said.
He touched his hat. “Name’s Duncan,” he said. “Remember me to your husband. He helped me find a very naughty bodice ripper yesterday for the wife. Best recommendation of the year so far.”
“Ah, so you’re a regular here,” I said.
“Too right. This shop is like a telly program! New every week,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the variety. Just last month we had a Danish lass who’d left her fourth husband when she found him shagging her second husband.” He wiggled the twin thickets above his eyes in gossipy glee.
“Sounds like this place is a book in itself,” I said. “Maybe you should write it.”
“Not enough murder, lass.” He studied me. “What brings you here? Don’t suppose you’re on the lam?”
I held a neutral expression amid a flutter of nerves. We’d sketched out a story, but this was the first time anyone had looked me square in the face and asked.
“Steve left his job,” I said. “We’ve been traveling. He’s looking for inspiration, and I’m…”
Duncan cocked his head and waited.
“I guess I’m looking for inspiration, too.” I shrugged apologetically. “I hope our chapter in your book isn’t too boring.”
“Nonsense,” Duncan said. “No one is boring.” He hooked a thumb back toward the bowels of the shop. “There’s stacks of inspiration right here. You’ll find it soon enough.”
He left with a ding of the bell over the door. From my perch behind the cash register, I watched as he touched the brim of his hat in the direction of the owner of the café across the street. The sun didn’t fully set in Scotland at this time of year until late, but around closing time every night, I would glance out the window, and my hand would itch to sketch its slow descent. Nick had joked that the soft light of the Scottish evenings made his face more luminous, like the lead actress on Outlander—which he’d been binge-watching—and I had laughed, but he was right about its effect, both on his face and on everything else. The Bookmark wasn’t even on Wigtown’s most picturesque stretch of road, but the waning rays still suffused a singular glow onto its buildings, and the street took on a gentle quality, as if it were easing you into its arms for a good-night hug.
The woman across the street finished sweeping the patio and leaned on her broom in a moment of fatigue. She was winding down for the night; with a swell of satisfaction, I too locked the door of the shop. Our shop. For now, anyway.
I flipped the sign on the door to CLOSED, and then my body took over, instinctively tensing my muscles to brace me for what it knew was coming. Right on cue, the church bells clanged, and I was no longer in Scotland. They ceased being the bells of Wigtown and became those of Westminster Abbey, ripping through the temperate London air in a celebratory aria I will never forget—because nobody was celebrating with them. The crowd, which practically screamed off the roofs when I’d arrived, was quiet. No cheering. Not even any booing. Just staring, either at us or at the devices in their hands, in icy silence.
For six sonorous clangs, I was back in front of that church. Exposed. Loathed. Ashamed.
The church bells made it hard to forget.
* * *
I trudged up our narrow staircase toward the smell of something burnt, as usual. The flat above the shop was, in many ways, an echo of the books below: tattered, torn in parts, but well loved. The ancient appliances were tricky to regulate even for an experienced chef, which Nick was not, and so the aromas wafting from his general direction come dinnertime were always just left of tempting. Nick had been raised in a place where chores were done before he would ever realize they needed doing, and in these few weeks on our own, I think he’d enjoyed playacting as a civilian—running to the market, doing laundry, scrubbing down the kitchen counters. What was a drudge for most people was a novelty for him, as was the concept of cooking dinner for us every night.
“Evening, Margot,” Nick said, greeting me at the door in an apron with a sketch of a carrot on it, his sandy hair sticking up haphazardly. “How’s the shop?”
“Hi, Steve,” I said, kissing him deeply. “You taste like butter.”
“All good cooks sample their ingredients.”
I wiped a smudge off his face. “But you’re technically not a good cook.”
“Not yet,” Nick said. “But I’ve come a long way from burning lasagna.” He made a voila gesture at the dining table, where two charred circles sat on mismatched, chipped dishes. “Now I’m burning meat pies.”
“These look almost edible!” I said.
“See?” Nick clapped adorably. “I’m really improving.”
I tossed my glasses onto the table, where they landed next to a copy of the Mirror. I didn’t look. Instead, I poked at one of the pies. Black flakes matching the ones on Nick’s cheek came away on my finger.
“Yes, unfortunately, they are indeed only almost edible. The second lot are in the oven now.” He frowned. “They look a bit better. Maybe? I keep wanting to text Gaz a photo, but…”
He didn’t need to finish.
“I missed you in the shop today,” I said. “You and your saucy new mustache.”
Nick wrapped his arms around me from behind. “I took my mustache into town for a bit,” he said. “Steve had a lot of advice for the butcher’s assistant about her rude girlfriend who deletes everything prematurely from the DVR. And then Steve popped round the off-license for a new box of wine and ran into Keith from the betting shop. You will not believe what his landlord is trying to pull.”
“Hang on,” I said, swiveling in his arms to face him. “We’ve only been here a few days. How do you know all these people already?”
He grinned. “I have always wanted to be some village’s busybody,” he said. He dipped his head and kissed me. “Isn’t it sexy?”
My laughter was lost in the clash of our mouths. Both our pulses quickened. So did my breathing.
“Margot,” he said, pulling away. “I approve of where you’re going with this, but if I ruin this second lot of pies, I might pull off your wig and weep into it.”
I nipped at his lip one last time. “Fine. I’ll go collect myself elsewhere.”
“Send my wife Bex out in about fifteen minutes for her pie, please,” he said, hurrying over to the oven. “These are going to blow her mind.”
Grinning, I headed into our tiny bedroom and pulled off my blond hair, plopping it onto the top of the dresser next to a pile of romance novels Nick had bought downstairs. One of them was called Fancy Ladies, and I itched to take a picture and send it to Freddie, who could spin it into a solid month of brotherly teasing.
But I couldn’t. We weren’t telling Freddie, or anybody else, a thing
. After our wedding-day fiasco, Nick and I went off the grid, hoping to start our married life anywhere other than amid the ashes of a tabloid tire fire. It had been hard. I missed my sister, my mother, our friends. I even missed Marj, the boys’ personal secretary, and the way she would hiss through her front teeth whenever one of them ticked her off (which was often). I especially missed Freddie. But missing Freddie was more complicated, because Freddie’s feelings for me didn’t stop at friendship. He and I had once crashed impulsively into a kiss; we’d agreed it was a careless, confused mistake, and I’d believed it. He apparently hadn’t been so sure, and now, thanks to a combination of betrayals both accidental and chillingly deliberate, everybody knew it.
Nick and I had both decided we couldn’t draw anyone else into our escape. It was better for them to know nothing, and safer for us to keep it that way. No texts, no emails, no check-ins, nothing that risked getting leaked to the media and threatening the peace of mind that we had found by hitting the road incognito, ambling sociably through small country towns, and now selling books to people who had no idea they were passing their bills to a royal cuckold and his faithless wife—the most hated person in Great Britain, if not the world.
Stop it, I told myself. The whole point is to get away from all that. But the damn bells had really thrown me off tonight. I shoved aside my feelings and dragged a hairbrush roughly through my own brown hair, matted and tragic from a day of being shoved into Margot’s flaxen disguise. With every night that Nick and I climbed into someone else’s lumpy old bed, our adrenaline surging from another day of going undetected and our hormones rising to match it, the shitshow that had erupted in London felt farther away. The ruse was working—both for us and on us.
With a tug of the brush, one of my hair extensions got caught in the bristles and came free. One more vestige of Duchess Rebecca that I could leave behind. I tossed it into the wastebasket and followed my nose back out into the kitchen, where Nick was taking two faintly less charred objects out of the oven. He set a pie in front of me with a flourish.