Naughty In Nice (A Royal Spyness Mystery)

his and then slowly brought it to his lips. “I’d kiss you properly, but I don’t want to do more damage to such a bruised and battered face.”
    There was a squawking outside as chickens scattered at the arrival of a big black car. The police had come.
    The next hours were an unpleasant mixture of interrogation by the police and examination in the hospital. Luckily I came out of both unscathed. No serious injuries, miraculously, and the police interview was made easier by the arrival of Jacques Germain and my grandfather.
    “Too bad that car went over the cliff,” he said, looking at me with concern. “I’d have liked to wring his ruddy neck for him. Doing that to my little girl.”
    Later that evening I was safely back at my mother’s villa, my wounds cleaned and still feeling sore but relieved. Queenie made an awful fuss of me. She insisted on standing at the foot of my bed and looking at me with those big cow eyes as if I were about to expire.
    “Please don’t go and die on me, my lady,” she said. I was rather touched until she added, “If you go and die, nobody else will employ me, as you bloody well know.”
    I hadn’t seen Darcy again since he left me at the hospital. I lay back and closed my eyes. I wondered if Jean-Paul had been arrested or if he’d managed to slip away. I sort of hoped the latter. In fact, I learned next morning that he was nowhere to be found. Much later it transpired that he’d taken the choicest pieces of his art collection, chartered a yacht and gone to America, where presumably he’d do very well for himself.
    Chanel and Vera moved out to Coco’s own villa, and Jacques Germain went with them. Granddad, Mummy and I spent some pleasant days together as I recovered. Darcy stopped by to visit every day. When I had sufficiently recovered he brought Bridget and little Colin. As I lay there, I thought a lot about Jeanine. I grieved for her and for what might have been. She and I shared the same father, but had led such different lives—mine full of hope and expectation, hers full of disappointment and the struggle to survive. Would I have fared as well if our situations had been reversed? It simply didn’t seem fair. Our father could have done more, I thought. He could have brought her to stay with us. We could have become friends. But even as these thoughts passed through my mind, I knew that they could never have happened. In our world, a piece of paper made all the difference, dividing the legitimate from the illegitimate.
    At the end of the week, Granddad came to sit beside me on the terrace and told me that he was thinking of going home. “If you’re well on the road to recovery, that is,” he said.
    “How about you?” I replied. “You seem a lot better already. Why not stay until you’re completely well?”
    “Don’t you worry about me, ducks. And it’s not that I don’t like it here. Smashing, isn’t it? But it’s like living in a dream world, and I miss my little house, and I like to keep busy, and I don’t feel right here. This is a place for posh people and their servants. So I don’t really fit anywhere, if you understand.”
    “I do,” I said. “Do you need me to come home with you, so that you find the way?”
    “Find the way?” He chuckled and gave me a pretend punch. “I’ve found my way through plenty of London fogs and a person who can do that can get around anywhere. No, you stay and recuperate properly, ducks. I’ll be just fine.”
    “I’ll miss you, but I’ll never forget that you came to help me when I needed you.”
    “I didn’t do much, did I?” he said. “Didn’t exactly earn my keep.”
    “Yes, you did. You were the one who told us to look at the photos and that was the first time I realized that the marquis had to have taken the necklace.”
    He stared out the window, out to a blue, choppy sea. “I just wish I’d spoken up sooner about that young man,” he said.
    “Which young man?” I asked sharply.
    “The valet. The one what bashed Sir Toby over the head. I saw it, you see.”
    “Saw what?”
    “In his face. When we were taken to the house I took one look at him and I knew right away he was guilty about something. Well, after all my years on the force you learn to pick up little signs like that. He had that look about him—wary but cocky that he’d got away with something. At the time I thought he’d probably nicked something from the house after the bloke was killed, and it didn’t seem worth