They were looking down in others, of course, because it was apparent that someone had tried to kill me today. Or rather not to kill me, but to kill one of us. I thought that Siegfried’s brutish countrymen would probably go more directly for a bomb through the window. Then, of course, I realized what should have been obvious all along: the rope had come from Balmoral. It had been intended for Prince George. Once again someone was targeting an heir to the throne—and this time somebody sixth in line. It was about time I stopped lying here and started working, before it was too late and one of the accidents took its toll.

Chapter 21

Chapter 21

Castle Rannoch
August 19

I must have dozed off for quite a while because when I awoke the room was bathed in pink twilight and there were sounds of commotion outside my door. Raised voices. A man shouting. I got up and opened the door cautiously. The first person I saw was Earl, standing at the top of the stairs. “She’s nowhere to be found, I tell you,” he was saying.

I came out onto the landing. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“It’s Babe. She’s disappeared,” he said. “I can’t find her anywhere.”

“Maybe she went out for a walk before dinner,” I suggested.

“We went out for a walk earlier,” he said. “We came back and she said she wanted to take a bath before dinner. She’d never go out walking again after she’d taken a bath. I did other things. Wrote a letter. Tried to make a telephone call to London—without success, I might add. Then when I went back to the room, she wasn’t there. I just don’t understand it.”

Fig had now come up the stairs to join us and together we went up the second flight to Earl and Babe’s bedroom.

“There, you see,” he said. Her dinner dress was laid out, ready to wear, on her bed. “She went to the bathroom in her robe. And her toilet bag is missing.”

“Have you checked the bathroom?” I asked. “She could have fallen asleep in the bath, or even passed out.”

“That was my first thought,” Earl said. “But the bathroom is unoccupied.”

We walked down the hallway to the nearest bathroom. It was, indeed, unoccupied and there was no sign that Babe had ever been there. No lingering steam on the mirror to indicate that a bath had been taken recently. (Of course, steam does not tend to linger long at Castle Rannoch, owing to the gale coming in through the open windows.)

“Is it possible she used another bathroom?” Fig suggested. “She might have found this one occupied and decided to look elsewhere.”