Page 90 of The Heir Apparent
Compliant, I pressed my cheek against the rough wooden floor of the boat and covered myself with the dusty blanket. We puttered along slowly, and I waited for the wail of police sirens that never came. At some point, Davide turned the engine off completely, and I heard the boom and splash of an oar hitting the water. He was rowing us towards the villa’s dock. A scraping of wood against stone meant that we had arrived. I felt the blanket pulled from my face and I looked up to see that the night sky was softening into dawn.
“Okay,carina,” Davide said. Shadows pooled in the hollows of his face. “Go inside, do nothing. Your papa will call you.”
Inside the villa, Louis was sitting in the conversation pit with his fingers pressed together as if in prayer. He did not turn to acknowledge me as I slid open the glass door.
“Louis,” I whispered. My voice sounded foreign and rough, and I realised it must be from the screaming. The floor lurched under me like I was still at sea.
He didn’t look at me. He didn’t move at all. He sat on the sofa as I stood there with my chattering teeth and shaky legs. I realised that one of Papa’s phone calls must have been to Louis to tell him what had happened and what must happen next.
“Louis, I—”
“What the fuck did you do, Lexi?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know. She was just… gone.”
He put his face into his palms and shook his head. Then he looked up at me with his fierce eyes. “What were you thinking, going out there with her?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop sayingsorry!” he shouted, and his rage was like a thunderclap. He surged up out of his seat, climbed out of the pit and stalked towards me. “She’s out there alone, do you realise that? She might have done this to herself. And because ofyou, I can’t go out there and find her.”
“The security guard is going there now,” I rasped.
Louis shook his head and looked at me with his heartbroken eyes. “No, he’s not. When the police eventually ask us, we’re to say he didn’t work here last night, he went home sick yesterday afternoon. No one’s looking for Mum right now. Everyone’s cleaning up your mess.”
I shook my head and staggered on my sea legs. “He’s going out there right now, he told me.”
Louis put his hands on my shoulders. “He said what Papa told him to say. Do you really think he let Mum hire some random guy to protect us without checking him out? He’s probably been paying him this whole time to keep tabs on her. I don’t know where he got that boat, but he’s taking it back now and then he’s going straight home.”
Someone was screaming, and I realised it was me. Louis put his hand over my mouth, and I beat my fists against his chest until my legs could no longer support me. Somehow, we were on the floor and Louis was holding me in his arms and rocking me while we wept. We stayed that way until the red light of dawn slid through the glass and announced that the rest of our lives was about to begin.
At 7 a.m., Louis went to the villa gates and told our security officers that Mum and the yacht were gone. She wasn’t answering her phone either. From there, one domino seemed to crash down upon the next. The coastguard was sceptical—she was an experienced sailor who was allowed to take her boat to sea without informing anyone—but when they radioed the yacht and received no response, they agreed to send someone out to check. By ten-thirty that morning, they found the yacht three nautical miles from Rapallo’s marina, with no one on board.A search and rescue team was deployed. Helicopters droned over the Tigullio Gulf. Papa and Stewart boarded a private plane to Genoa at 11 a.m., and they were sitting in the villa’s living room three hours later.
By then, someone in the coastguard had leaked that Princess Isla was missing, and a huge flotilla of photographers gathered in the marina near our dock. By sundown, Stewart produced his bottle of liquid Valium, and I woke up the next morning in a luxury resort in Portofino. Our security officers had decided the villa was unfit for two future kings and moved us to safer quarters while I slumped unconscious against Louis’s shoulder in the back of a town car.
It would take three days to find Mum. Like the lifebuoy, she drifted westward. At some point, she became tangled in sargassum, which kept her from sinking to the depths and being fed upon by larger predators. A chopper hired by a French tabloid spotted her trapped among the swirling brown mess. Before they radioed it in, they flew low enough to get pictures of her floating there, bloated and decayed. No one dared publish them, but they still managed to find their way onto the internet, where they replicated like a virus that had found the perfect host. Blogs started to speculate that she had been assassinated by Papa, who wanted her out of the way so he could marry Annabelle.
But four weeks after she went into the water, a toxicology report revealed she had a blood alcohol reading of 0.12 and had taken benzodiazepine as prescribed by her doctor for anxiety. A coroner concluded that she was likely unsteady on her feet from the combination of drugs and alcohol and had toppled into the water by accident. Disoriented, she would have been unable to haul herself back into the boat and, as she struggled, she was pulled helplessly into the black night by a strong current.
The Italian police, the coroner and the palace were eager to move on, and the mainstream media accepted the obvious narrative of an ex-princess taking a stupid risk while champagne and Xanax fizzed in her bloodstream.
The day after Mum disappeared, a young Rapallo police officer scrawled the nameDavide Rossiin his notebook. He went to Davide’s house in Zoagli to confirm he was off sick the night Mum took the yacht out into the bay. And that was the end of it. No one ever asked our protection officers if they saw Davide Rossi go home. And for reasons I can only guess, they never told anyone that, as far as they were aware, he was standing on the dock the whole night.
A month after Mum’s body was found, a large sum of money passed through a Panama shell company and slipped into a Genoa bank account. Davide Rossi was never called as a witness in any coronial inquest and the police never publicly mentioned his name.
But twelve years later, the Duke of Clarence had hired a team of private investigators to dig into my past. One went to the Jennings vineyard and came back with nothing. Another went to interview everyone involved in the search for my mother. The police officer who had scrawledDavide Rossiin his notepad was the type of man who kept all his papers from every case he worked on. With the PI’s help, he searched his garage for a box marked2011—Principessa. A week later, the investigator tracked Davide Rossi down to a rather nice villa in Porto Venere.
And why would Rossi stay quiet? The man who had bought his silence was gone—buried in ice, he heard—and here was his brother with another deal, another promise of another cheque. Who was he to say no to these feckless people with their fat wallets?
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
5 November 2023
I could hardly recognise the woman I saw in the mirror anymore. She was a stranger, someone called Princess Alexandrina, a sleek creature who had absolutely nothing to do with me.
Mary had commissioned Erdem to make me a bespoke skirt suit, black and sculptural, with an exaggerated flared blazer that reminded me of a Victorian-era bustle. I suspected she picked this silhouette to obscure my vanishing hips, which I thought was very clever, even if it did alarm the doctor buried somewhere inside me. And, after months of training, I was finally able to walk in Louboutin So Kates—as slutty as they were expensive—so that I teetered on 120-millimetre black-patent spikes during my very first investiture ceremony.
The honours were dispensed in a Watford Castle reception room, and afterwards I took photographs with the recipients, and then lingered to chat while light refreshments were served. I liked investitures, pinning medals to the lapels of people who did brave and interesting things, like canoe across the Irish Sea to raise money for wounded veterans, or discover a new species of wasp on a nature reserve in Kent. It didn’t make much sense for any of these fine people to kneel before me. But it was nice to see them in their best suits and specially purchased hats, serenein the knowledge that they had done one good thing with their lives.
