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
Praise for THE ROYAL WE
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
