Murder Most Royal

Chapter 11

Sir Simon Holcroft lay wide awake in his bed in London, after a long and complicated journey down from The Highlands. The private secretary had left his wife Sarah in the charming Balmoral cottage to finish their holiday alone. The Queen needed him at Sandringham, that was obvious. She hadn’t actually contacted him to say as much, but everything was clearly falling apart in his absence. Body parts in the mud . . . newspaper interviews . . . the Queen’s absence at church on Christmas Day. The winter visit was Not Going As Intended. It was New Year’s Day and he itched to be back at his desk, on the phone to the people that mattered, sorting everything out for the Boss and showing Rozie how it was done.

He had already had a long conversation over the phone with the chief constable of Norfolk, during which Sir Simon had made his displeasure quite clear. Ditto with the editor of the Recorder. The palace had always had a tricky relationship with the newspaper: one minute they were rhapsodising over the colour of the Duchess of Cambridge’s latest dress, and the next they were running an exposé on palace expenses and rumours about ructions among the staff.

The newspaper interview with Jack Lions had been particularly difficult. Especially with its picture of the chief constable himself visiting Sandringham on Christmas Eve. Someone should have stopped that from happening. It made it look as if the police were in the palace’s pocket, which they most certainly were not. Although, admittedly, the chief constable had been very helpful on the phone.

But more than that, Sir Simon longed to be useful in the matter of the missing person. When it came to the matter of crime in the Queen’s vicinity, he had recently proved that he had a talent for rooting out perpetrators. He wasn’t sure what it was – perhaps a skill he had unwittingly picked up in the navy or the Foreign Office. Her Majesty must be feeling particularly vulnerable at this time. He wanted to be there to protect her. It was really quite a surprise, actually, that she hadn’t asked him to cut his holiday short. Even so, he pictured her relief when he finally got to Norfolk.

On Monday, 2nd January, another article appeared in the Recorder.

For the second Sunday in a row, Her Majesty was missing from the usual royal line-up at St Mary Magdalene Church at Sandringham. This is unprecedented for the elderly monarch, who hasn’t missed a service in decades. Royal sources say she has a bad cold, but rumours have it that she is upset by the violent death of family friend Ned St Cyr, whose dismembered hand was found within walking distance of the Sandringham Estate. Locals are concerned for the Queen’s health, but say the plucky monarch will ‘get through this somehow’ with her usual Dunkirk spirit.

‘What fresh hell?’ Philip asked, scrumpling up the page in question and chucking it in the direction of the fire. ‘What “locals” are concerned for your health? Who in God’s name calls you “plucky”?’

The Queen was too irritated to reply. She decided to take her mind off it by visiting the horses in the stud.

Drawing up outside the mare barn in her favourite Land Rover, she found the immaculate yard empty. It had been a last-minute decision to come, and no one walked over to greet her. She didn’t mind – in fact she was rather relieved. She didn’t quite have the energy yet for a discussion of every mare’s and foal’s progress with the manager: she just wanted to greet some old equine friends, hand out some festive mints and get back to the warm.

Leaving her protection officer at the car and walking across the frosted cobbles, she paused by the tack room to catch her breath, cough, and curse the flu for making her feel so light-headed. A glossy, coal-black cocker spaniel puppy looked up at her. He was sitting alone, waiting for his owner. The Queen was impressed by how well behaved he was, and bent down to stroke his eager head. Through a gap in the tack room window, she could hear a female voice was talking about parasites. She idly wondered if they were discussing equine diseases. When it came to horses, she was always keen to learn.

‘Shhh, you can’t say that!’ a male voice was saying.

It was the ‘shhh’ that caught the Queen’s attention. She stopped and listened properly.

‘But that’s what I’m saying.’ It was a girl’s voice, soft and melodious, but loud enough to carry. ‘They feed off us. We pay for them, and they get to live in their fancy houses and race their horses, and own all the shit in the world. And we just let them. It blows my mind.’

Oh. That kind of parasite. Honestly!

‘He’s, what, nearly a hundred. She’s just as bad. They’re practically nineteenth-century.’

‘Shhh. Stop it! They aren’t!’

No they aren’t, the Queen thought crossly. We’re as twentieth-century as you can get. She had lived through three-quarters of it, before cantering through a decade and a half of the new millennium. Young people needed to learn more history.

‘Well, they are. I mean, I bet I could run this estate as well as she does,’ the girl went on. (I bet she couldn’t, the Queen thought.) ‘Better. I wouldn’t kill half the bird life, for a start.’

‘Yer talking squit,’ the boy said.

‘You’re talking squit. All you see is the bling and the nice little job, but think about it. They won the lottery when they were born. And we bow and scrape to them like they earned it just because their ancestors killed a bunch of people in the Middle Ages. It’s like, we give all the rich people all the stuff – the influencers, the billionaires, the celebs, the royals, whatever – we let them take everything and we effing admire them for it. We give them our attention. It’s like “You’ve got more than me so you’re better than me. What else can I give you?”’

‘Shut up, will yer?’ the boy’s voice growled, taut with urgency. The Queen recognised it as that of Arthur Raspberry, a local lad from the estate who they had taken on as a groom last summer. ‘They pay our wages.’

‘Not mine,’ the girl said.

‘You don’t work, remember? Mum’s and Dad’s and mine.’

‘Only because they own effing everything. If they just minded their own business, Mum and Dad could work for themselves. And I can guarantee you Dad wouldn’t be fattening birds for them and their fancy guests to kill for the sake of it.’

‘Everything gets eaten,’ Arthur said.

‘Like that makes it better,’ the girl scoffed. ‘It’s not just the pheasant that get killed, it’s the predators that take the chicks. It’s a wonder anything survives.’

‘They love animals, and you know it.’

‘Yeah, stuffed in a pie or stuck on the walls.’

‘I hope I’m not interrupting.’

This last voice was the Queen’s. She had walked round and was now standing at the door to the tack room. Two pale young faces stared out at her, with identical hazel eyes framed by long blond lashes, startled and horrified.

‘You have a very well-behaved puppy,’ the Queen observed. One might as well start on a polite note, and it was the only one she could think of.

The girl, who wore a rainbow fleece over sky-blue leggings that matched her hair, slithered down from the high shelf where she’d been sitting. When she reached the ground, she blinked, and said, ‘He’s my auntie’s. I’m looking after him. His name’s Nelson.’

‘Your Majesty,’ Arthur prompted her under his breath.

‘Your Majesty.’ The girl’s expression very much said, And you know how I feel about that.

‘I came to see Estimate,’ the Queen explained. ‘Don’t worry, I know where to go.’

If anything, young Arthur’s face paled further. He stood rigidly to attention. ‘I’ll come with you, ma’am. I mean . . . I don’t need to be here. We were just . . .’

‘Talking politics,’ the Queen put in for him. ‘I must say, I wasn’t sure your generation did that anymore. It’s quite reassuring. In a way.’

The girl continued to stare. Then, as if she’d suddenly remembered, she stuck one boot-clad foot out behind her and bobbed into an inelegant curtsey. Aware of the absurdity of it all, she suddenly grinned.

‘Awkward,’ she muttered. Her eyes gleamed with a defiant naughtiness that reminded the Queen very much of her sister Margaret at that age – or indeed any age. It was always difficult to remain cross with Margaret when she herself was smiling and sunny. The Queen wondered if this girl had a similar effect on her long-suffering family.

At Estimate’s stall, the retired racing champion was grateful for a Polo mint. The Queen spent a little while congratulating her on her new life as a mother. But she hadn’t forgotten the recent exposition of her own family’s iniquities. The young groom hung back wretchedly. She felt sorry for him.

‘Was that your sister?’ she asked.

He hung his head. ‘Yes, ma’am. Her name’s Ivy.’

‘I see. I thought you looked alike. What a spirited girl.’

‘Yeah, kind of. Did you hear much of what she was on about?’

‘I think I got the gist of it,’ the Queen told him. ‘She’s not a royalist, I take it.’

‘Not as such.’ Arthur twisted his limbs in paroxysms of embarrassment. ‘She dun’t mean it. I mean, she does, but she’s seventeen. She’s like that about everything, ma’am, a bit over the top. It gets her into trouble. It’s why she hangs around with the horses even though she’s not supposed to. But she’s so good with them, it’s like . . . it’s like telepathy or something. And it’s the only thing that de-stresses her. She’s been kind of wound up since our auntie’s accident. And then she found that hand.’

The Queen stared at him. ‘It was your sister who found it?’

‘Yes. On the beach. She thought it was a starfish or something but . . .’

‘Poor girl. What a shock.’

He winced at the memory. ‘Yeah, it was. She was pretty freaked out all day. She locked herself in her room for hours. She would’ve gone to our auntie’s, but she can’t.’ He looked hopeless and frustrated. The absence of the aunt was obviously causing problems.

‘Did you say your aunt had an accident?’ the Queen asked gently.

‘Yeah. Her name’s Judy, ma’am. Judy Raspberry. She’s the treasurer at the Women’s Institute. You’ve met her a few times.’

The Queen’s annual trip to the WI in West Newton, a nearby village on the estate, was one of the highlights of each winter visit. ‘Yes, of course I know Mrs Raspberry. What happened?’

The groom ran a distracted hand through his hair.

‘Hit-and-run, the week before Christmas. It happened in Dersingham, where she lives. She was lying in the road for ages before someone found her.’

‘How bad was it?’ the Queen asked anxiously. She was very fond of Judy Raspberry, who was one of the lynchpins of the WI and much else besides. They had tasted many a Victoria sponge together, watched many a dog show, remarked on the beauty of many a flower arrangement. She was a talented pigeon breeder and her birds had beaten the Queen’s in a couple of races.

‘Very bad,’ Arthur said dully. ‘She’s in a coma, at the Queen Elizabeth.’

The local hospital was named after the Queen’s mother. One became used to being buildings and ships eventually.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’

‘Ivy took it harder than me,’ Arthur went on. ‘She never really liked it at home. Mum kept going on at her about school until she went half mad with it. But Auntie Judy got it. She was somewhere Ivy could go, you know? And now it’s all gone to shi—Gone bad, ma’am.’

‘It must be a huge worry for you all.’

He shrugged. ‘Coming here helps. Like I say, it calms me. Ivy, too. Thanks for not minding. So she can stay? Keep coming over, I mean?’

‘Yes. If she can pull her weight here, as you say.’

‘No question, ma’am. She’s got a gift with animals. Horses and dogs especially.’

‘Then this is where she should be.’

The Queen thought about Judy Rasperry all the way back to the house. A coma! The poor woman! Lying alone in the road until she was discovered. Was she still conscious at that point? And two young people who clearly needed her help. Judy was a woman in her fifties: at that age when everybody needs you – parents, children, workmates, pets . . . At WI meetings, she was always the person everyone turned to if the lights failed or the guest speaker was late or somebody went off with the key to the loo. Her stories about it afterwards were a riot. How would they cope without her? And what about Arthur, and his forthright little sister? It was the deepest fear of many women, the Queen knew: not being there for the people who needed them. She understood it well.

‘Feeling better?’ Philip asked when she got back.

‘Up to a point.’ She told him about Mrs Raspberry and then, to lighten the tone a bit, about Ivy in the tack room.

‘Good God! On our own estate! We should have her horsewhipped.’

‘I told her brother she can help out with the horses. I think it will do her good. She was the one who found the hand, by the way.’

‘Ah! So we have her to thank for all of this,’ Philip grunted.

The Queen pursed her lips. ‘If you mean for alerting the police to what happened to Ned, then yes. Otherwise, we might never have known.’

‘I mean for making us suddenly wonder if all our friends and neighbours are stone-cold killers.’

‘I never did,’ the Queen assured him.

‘I still do,’ he muttered. ‘And by the way, Simon’s back. He wanted to surprise you. And by the look on your face, he did. Ha!’

Chapter 12

Her private secretary had put on weight in Scotland, as he usually did. Joining her in her study fifteen minutes later, he looked well fed to the point of rotundness. Were those jowls, emerging gently from under his naval-officer jaw? Age comes to all of us eventually, the Queen thought. Just you wait.

‘I hope you had a pleasant holiday?’ she asked.

‘Magnificent, Your Majesty. Just what the doctor ordered. Thank you very much.’

‘And yet you’re here so soon?’

He straightened somewhat, perhaps catching the glint of steel behind her question, and blustered something about how good it was to be back in the saddle, which was an odd phrase to use for one of the few members of her Private Office who didn’t ride.

‘I’m sorry I wasn’t around to help you when the unfortunate hand was found.’

‘I seem to recall that you were, remotely,’ the Queen said, with the same edge to her voice.

Sir Simon missed the edge. ‘Talking to the chief constable, you mean, ma’am? It wasn’t a problem, I assure you.’

The Queen explained to him that it was, rather, and he was slightly chastened. However, he soon perked up when he explained he’d been catching up with Bloomfield again this morning.

‘There was a packet of drugs missing from the bag on the beach, ma’am, judging from the way it was packed. His officers are making enquiries about what happened to it. But if anyone offers you cheap cocaine, you’ll know where it came from.’

‘Very funny, Simon.’

He straightened his face. ‘And there’s an update on where the plastic bag went in the water. The currents and tides in the Wash are a complicated study. I won’t bother you with—’

‘No, do,’ the Queen said. ‘I’m interested.’

He seemed surprised. ‘Certainly. Well, if I’ve understood it correctly, then generally, there’s a tidal drift on this coast that runs from north to south, but among the swirling waters of the bay, on our little stretch of the Wash it ends up running south to north. The forensic team modelling suggests the bag’s likely to have been deposited in the Great Ouse near King’s Lynn, a couple of days before the storm. That would make it some time between the nineteenth and twenty-first of December, four to six days after Mr St Cyr disappeared. The hand was in good condition before it went into the water, so the question is, where it – and he – was during those four to six days.’

‘I see. Do they have any thoughts?’

‘It looks as though it might have been in cold storage. It makes it harder to work out at which point it was detached. And that still leaves the question of why. Bloomfield is edging towards thinking that it might be a professional job after all. They have several lines of enquiry. Mr St Cyr had a certain amount of debt, for example; he liked to gamble.’

‘I remember,’ the Queen said. ‘He played cards for money here sometimes. He was very good at it. We had a roulette table once and he was glued to it all night.’

‘There’s a team looking into his finances. No obvious communication yet regarding large wagers that might have got him into hot water. No sign of unusual withdrawals from his bank accounts. Or at least, there were many, but lately they were almost exclusively for things like electric fencing and wild ponies. I can find out what that was all about if you—’

‘I know what it was,’ the Queen told him. ‘Rewilding.’

‘Re . . .?’

‘Look it up, Simon. It’s been the talk of north Norfolk. The duke thinks it’s the next big thing.’

‘I will, ma’am. “Rewilding”.’ He made a note. ‘Meanwhile, they’re searching Abbottswood itself for the body, in case the trip to London was some sort of double bluff. Then they’ll move on to Mr Fisher’s estate at Muncaster.’

The Queen’s eye roll did not escape her private secretary.

‘He did threaten to kill Mr St Cyr more than once, in front of witnesses,’ he reminded her.

‘Yes, but honestly, Simon. Mr St Cyr had that effect on some people. He wasn’t the easiest neighbour.’

‘Well, quite.’

The Queen sighed. ‘Anyway, I gather that Mr Fisher wasn’t in the country on the fifteenth.’

‘No, he wasn’t, ma’am – but then, nor is he the kind of person, I think the reasoning goes, to do his own dirty work, so to speak. Which becomes rather difficult for us.’

‘Oh?’

‘The last person Mr St Cyr called before he left for London was Julian Cassidy.’

‘Mr Cassidy? Our new conservation manager? The bean counter?’

‘Yes, ma’am. As you know, he was working for Mr Fisher until November. I understand there were various disputes about the land. Mr Cassidy was seen scuffling with Mr St Cyr in the car park of the Horse and Hound in Castle Rising in early December. Mr St Cyr didn’t press charges, but there were several witnesses.’

‘Oh, dear.’ The Queen sighed. ‘How unfortunate. Do we know why?’

‘Not really. He claims it was a parking dispute.’

‘But the police think Mr Cassidy might have killed Ned on Matt Fisher’s behalf, even though he stopped working for him several weeks before. I must say, Simon, that sounds incredibly unlikely.’

‘They don’t know what to make of it at the moment, ma’am. He doesn’t have an alibi for the fifteenth, unlike Mr Fisher. He did try to punch Mr St Cyr. But it seemed out of character.’

‘That’s a relief. We’re not aware of other violent incidents, are we? Is this something we need to worry about?’

‘Not as far as we know. I’ve had a quick chat to the estate manager. Cassidy’s references were immaculate, and in the way of these things, the staff know several people who’ve known him for years, back to his days as a biology student at Oxford. He was known for rescuing injured birds and hedgehogs and so on.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. There was quite a female following who thought of him as a bit of a St Francis of Assisi. They may not have known that he went shooting at weekends. He has a reputation for being laid-back, if anything.’

The Queen tried to picture the bean counter storming down to London from Sandringham with murderous intent . . . But of course, it wouldn’t have been ‘storming’: Ned was lured there, it seemed. It would have been planned. That was even harder to imagine. One didn’t want to harbour a cold-blooded murderer on one’s estate, but she really didn’t think she was.

Sir Simon was followed shortly afterwards by Mrs Maddox, who was armed with the week’s suggested menus for approval. The housekeeper saw the Queen’s dark expression and asked if she could help.

‘Not really,’ the Queen admitted. ‘It’s been an interesting morning. Actually, there’s one thing. Do you know how Mrs Raspberry from the WI is getting on? I gather she’s had an accident.’

Mrs Maddox was north Norfolk born and bred, and thought it a personal affront if she didn’t know what was going on in any village within a twenty-mile radius.

‘Oh, that! It was awful! We did wonder whether to tell you, ma’am, but we didn’t want to worry you so close to Christmas, with you so busy in London, and then with your cold. It was very upsetting. She was tossed into the air like a rag doll. Not that anyone saw it directly, but she must have been, the way she landed in that bush. My niece works at the ICU at the Queen Elizabeth. She got the shock of her life when they brought Judy in. All over knocks and bruises and a gash on her head . . . How anyone could drive away from that . . .? It’s wicked. May he rot.’

‘I spoke to her nephew at the stud,’ the Queen said. ‘His sister seems to rely on her.’

‘I’m not surprised. Judy’s wonderful with the teenagers. Not just her own, who’ve left home now, but all of them in the villages round here. Setting up clubs, you know, getting them holiday jobs, like with the Fen-Time festival, when it was running. Anything to keep them out of trouble. She sponsors a lovely refugee family from Syria. She spent months fundraising to make sure they had everything they needed. And I don’t know what the parish council would do without her.’

‘Is there a Mr Raspberry?’ the Queen wondered.

‘There was. He sold wood-burning stoves in Burnham Market. Ran off with a woman from Blackheath.’ Mrs Maddox sniffed. Her look of disdain suggested she thought as little of south-east London as she did of men who ran off with the women who lived there. ‘Judy was too good for him. Any man would be lucky to have her, if she had time for him.’ The housekeeper stopped short and blinked away tears. ‘Anyway, thank you for the menus, ma’am. I’ll let chef know.’

The Queen got up and stood at the window, brooding. What a winter this was. Two people injured – one of them almost certainly dead – and it struck her how both of them had been described as particularly alive. Philip had said it about Ned, and Mrs Maddox had said something similar about Mrs Raspberry. They shared a certain bloody-mindedness, which she rather admired, an antipathy to drugs and a willingness to get stuck in. They knew each other through Ned’s festival. She wondered idly if they were friends.

She returned to the memorandum from the Cabinet secretary on her desk but her mind went back to Judy. At the last WI meeting, they had discussed an article Judy was writing for the Flying Post about Norfolk’s pigeons in the war. They had played a critical role delivering messages to and from the Front for the Signal Corps. The birds were decorated for their bravery: no fewer than thirty-two had won the Dickin Medal. Several had undoubtedly saved lives. Judy’s knowledge and curiosity on the subject was impressive. Even though it was a part-time interest for her, she had a journalist’s instinct for getting to the heart of a story. Another string to her bow.

The Queen caught sight of the mug that little Prince George had given her for Christmas. I may look like I’m listening to you, but in my head, I’m thinking about pigeons. Who else had she been talking to about them recently?

Then she remembered. Gradually, her curiosity turned to a prickling sense of dread. It wasn’t a suspicion, exactly. Just a twitch. A worry. A series of connections.

She reached for the telephone on her desk, which sat beside a picture of a small man in a white coat, standing in front of a table of silver cups he had won for her with champion birds. The operator asked where to direct the call.

‘I’d like to talk to my loft manager,’ she said.

Chapter 13

The job of royal loft manager came with a house near the abandoned railway station at Wolferton and a pigeon loft in the garden for two hundred birds. The loft itself had recently been refurbished with ventilated roofing, nesting boxes and perches, and awnings under which they could sunbathe in the summer. In pigeon terms, it was as lavish as Sandringham. The man who got to manage such lavishness was a friendly Lancastrian called Stephen Day, whose cheerfulness belied a cut-throat competitive spirit that made him an excellent choice for the job.

After a minute or two, his warm, Christmas pudding of a voice came reassuringly down the line.

‘Happy New Year, Your Majesty. And what can I do for you?’

‘I wondered if you might know anything about money laundering, Mr Day.’

‘Ha! You’re talking to the wrong person, ma’am. I can just about manage online banking. Is that any help?’

‘Money laundering through pigeon clubs. Someone was talking to me about it at New Year. From what I can remember, there are gangs that buy into the clubs so they can sell prize birds at below their value and record a higher price in the accounts. I think that’s it, anyway.’

‘Why would they do that, ma’am?’

‘So that any illicit money could disappear in the difference between the two. I assumed at first that you wouldn’t be able to hide much money that way, but then I realised how much auction prices have rocketed recently. I found it rather alarming. So you aren’t aware of anything like that happening round here?’

‘I had no idea you were such an expert on crime, ma’am. It’s news to me. I can’t see that happening in East Anglia.’

‘That’s what I thought, too, to start with.’

‘I can ask around, though, if you’d like.’

‘If you wouldn’t mind.’

‘I’ll tell you who’d know, mind you,’ Mr Day reflected, ‘except she’s not around at the moment – and that’s Mrs Raspberry. She talked to a lot of people for that article she did for the Flying Post. If something odd was going on, she’d know.’

The Queen’s heart sank. This had been her suspicion, too, or part of it.

‘I heard about her accident,’ she said.

‘Horrible, isn’t it? He just drove right off and left her, whoever he was. There’s quite a few round here would like to get their hands on him.’

‘Was she researching anything in particular, do you know?’

‘Ah! I know what you’re thinking. Was she doing anything that might have caused the hit-and-run?’

This was exactly what the Queen had been thinking, but before she could resolutely deny it, Mr Day continued, ‘We had the same idea, my wife and me. Judy said she was working on a new piece, based on something she’d seen at the beach. Not to do with money laundering, I don’t think, but it might have been to do with drugs. She was very exercised about them.’

‘Did she try and tell the police?’

‘Ah, therein lies a tale, ma’am,’ he added. ‘Not a very happy one.’

‘Oh?’

‘We don’t know. We were wondering about it all over Christmas – what if she’d got into hot water and the hit-and-run wasn’t an accident? My wife was very worried, so she rang the police to ask if Judy had said anything to them, and the desk sergeant told her not to worry, they were on to it.’

‘Oh, good.’

‘Ah, but . . . So, my wife has a friend from her yoga class whose son works at the police HQ in Norwich, and she’s a bit of a gossip, if you don’t mind me saying so . . .’

‘Ah.’ The Queen tried to sound both disapproving and encouraging of gossip in all its forms.

‘She said her son told her they were saying at the HQ that Judy was one of those silly women always trying to give the police information and expecting them to jump to it, but the accident was clearly just that, an accident, because of where it happened in the bend in the road. It wasn’t something you could engineer, they thought. They were just annoyed anyone thought they weren’t doing their job.’

‘How very unfortunate.’

‘It was a bit. They don’t realise that people talk to each other, that’s the problem, ma’am.’

‘It is indeed. Mrs Day must have been upset.’

‘She was furious. That’s the last time she tries to help.’ He moved on. ‘But don’t worry, as I say, I’ll ask around and find out for you about this gang business. Birds sold on the cheap, you say? Sold on the “cheep”! I think there’s a Christmas cracker joke in there somewhere. As soon as I hear any more I’ll let you know.’

‘Thank you, Mr Day. That’s very kind.’

‘Will you be coming over soon, ma’am, to visit the loft? You wouldn’t believe it, but my wife’s invested in a still and is making some rather impressive gin. We’d love to offer you a jigger or two to try, if you’re amenable.’

‘You have a very inventive family,’ she said, impressed as always by the industry and ingenuity of her tenants.

The Queen put the phone down and gazed out of the window again. Then she picked it up one more time and asked the operator to put her through to Rozie.

Rozie had been in the middle of some paperwork, but she was pleased to get the call. In London there was always something to grab her attention but here, in the depths of the country, and with Sir Simon now taking all the interesting phone calls, she had never felt so far away from the centre of the action. From her mother’s chatty texts about excursions with friends to West End theatres and Soho restaurants, to friends’ Instagram images of pools and ski slopes on far-flung holidays, she had the feeling the world was somehow carrying on without her. Norfolk had its attractions, but an open field, however beautifully lit by the rays of a setting sun, was never going to beat a poolside bar in St Barts.

‘I think I might have a little job for you,’ the Queen said, when Rozie arrived at her study.

Rozie positively grinned. ‘Of course, ma’am. What can I do?’

The Queen outlined her concerns, and the recent conversation with Mr Day.

‘I’d like you to look into it for me. Privately.’

Rozie thought she detected a certain glint in the Boss’s eye that she hadn’t seen since they’d left London.

‘With pleasure, ma’am.’

‘And I think I know someone who might help.’

Chapter 14

That afternoon, Rozie closed her laptop and told Sir Simon that she was going out for a run. This wasn’t unusual: she worked hard to maintain her levels of fitness from her army days. Today, she covered the mile or so from the gates of Sandringham to the village of Dersingham, down the long alley of copper beeches and along the verges and paths beside the road. It was dusk and there wasn’t much traffic aside from the odd red double-decker bus – which came as a surprise to Rozie, so far from London – and a couple of mud-splashed four-wheel drives. Given the reason for her visit, she was very careful to stand right back as they passed by.

She noticed, as she passed, how the mathematical neatness of the grass and hedges of the estate gradually gave way to the rougher walls and lumpier fields of the village. She hadn’t realised how quickly she had become used to the standards of the Sandringham groundsmen. The estate had a film set quality to it: everything always tidy and in its place.

Beyond its boundaries, the winter gloaming cast a grey pall over the paddocks and the church. Rozie passed the Feathers pub, named after the three-feathered badge of the Prince of Wales, and a few buildings further along she came to the little knapped flint cottage the Queen had asked her to visit. The light peeping through its windows cast a friendly glow. She waited for a while, listening to the sound of a dog enthusiastically barking, until eventually the door was opened.

‘Hello!’ the occupant said.

‘Hello, Katie.’ Rozie grinned.

The other woman’s cropped auburn hair framed a wide, freckled face and clear, clever eyes behind stylish glasses. She was a few years older than Rozie and dressed for leisure in yoga pants and a red jumper featuring white sheep that looked like something Princess Diana might have worn. The dog leaping up behind her was a young dachshund, glossy and keen.

‘So it’s happened,’ she said, standing aside to let Rozie in.

‘Yeah.’ Rozie nodded and walked inside.

The last time they met, Katie had been handing over the role of assistant private secretary to Rozie. After that, she had dropped off the radar. This was unusual for the Royal household, where people tended to stay in touch unless there had been some sort of scandal. There had been mutterings about Katie ‘dropping the ball’ among some members of the household, but nothing major. According to Sir Simon she had had ‘a few mental health problems’, but he hadn’t gone into detail and Rozie had had too many other things going on to pay much attention. Until this morning, when the Boss had mentioned her out of the blue.

You can trust Katie, she had said, with a sharp look from behind the bifocals that Rozie had learned to interpret. It meant, You can trust Katie with secrets, and specifically what I’m about to tell you. Rozie dealt in secrets all the time and most of them could also be shared with Sir Simon. A small number could not. The look behind the bifocals this morning suggested that what the Queen then told her was among the latter type.

‘So, Boss thinks the killer’s in Dersingham?’

‘She thinks they might be,’ Rozie said.

By now they were standing in the cottage’s little kitchen. Katie was pouring boiling water onto a fragrant selection of oriental leaves in a glass teapot while Rozie finished outlining the Queen’s concerns. It was Katie’s predecessor, Aileen Jaggard, who had initiated Rozie into the secret club that all APSs, past and present, belonged to. It transpired that they were the only people the Queen trusted to help her with her little sideline in ‘problem-solving’, as she liked to put it – or successfully investigating crimes, as Rozie had subsequently discovered.

‘And it’s to do with pigeons?’

‘Or drugs, or both,’ Rozie said. ‘She’s keeping all options open at the moment. It may be nothing.’

‘It’s not usually nothing,’ Katie muttered.

‘Did you help her a lot?’ Rozie asked. ‘This way, I mean.’

Katie reached into a cupboard and took a couple of delicate, handmade porcelain teacups from a shelf, arranging them carefully on the tray beside the pot. ‘Once or twice,’ she acknowledged. ‘But never murder. How about you?’

‘A couple of times last year. Not that you’d know the Boss did anything. One man got knighted. Another got a medal. She likes to keep a low profile, doesn’t she?’

Katie grinned. ‘It’s like Bletchley Park in the war. Or the first rule of Fight Club. Have you met the others yet?’

Rozie shook her head. ‘The other APSs, you mean? Only Aileen.’

‘I met them all at a get-together they were having at the Ritz,’ Katie said, avoiding Rozie’s eye and rearranging the cups. ‘They were such amazing people. One of them actually did work at Bletchley and she was totally with it still, and fabulous. I could see myself like her one day, you know, this kick-ass old lady like the one in Jenny Joseph’s poem who will wear purple and a red hat.’

Rozie didn’t know the poem. She made a mental note to look it up when she got back. Katie led the way into the living room, small and neat and lined with as many books as could fit. There was a small study table in one corner, with yet more books piled up on it. The dachshund waited for Rozie to choose a seat and then jumped up to sit beside her.

‘Ignore Daphne,’ Katie told her, putting the tray down on a small coffee table and curling up in the chair opposite them. ‘She just wants to be cuddled and admired and getting it twenty-four-seven from me isn’t enough.’

Rozie was happy to oblige the wriggling puppy. She hadn’t grown up with dogs, but she was generally fond of them, and she was certainly used to them by now.

‘She was a present from the Boss,’ Katie explained. ‘To keep me company.’

Rozie wondered why the Queen had thought Katie needed a dog. She knew that she had been a high-flying civil servant in the Home Office before taking on the APS job. Usually, people did it for several years before going on to greater things. Rumours abounded as to what the ‘mental health problems’ might have been. Sir Simon had respected Katie’s privacy, so Rozie did, too. If Katie wanted to explain, she would. In any case, they had other things to talk about.

‘Have you met Judy Raspberry?’ she asked.

Katie smiled. ‘Have I? I’d been here for about seven minutes when she arrived with a pot of home-made vegetable lasagne, in case I was vegetarian, and a bag of sausages and bacon, in case I wasn’t. A week after I got Daphne, she invited herself over for tea and took a look around. The following day she came laden with dog paraphernalia. There was a harness to make the lead more comfortable, a dog bed, a ball-thrower and some old towels for rubbing her down after walks. Judy said it was all going spare, but I swear she bought the harness specially.’

‘Is she like that with everyone?’

‘Not necessarily. I’ve heard that if you get on the wrong side of her you’ll know about it.’

‘On the wrong side of her how?’

Katie cupped one of the teacups in her hands and breathed in the steam. Her clean-living lifestyle was very noticeable after Sandringham, where the gin would be flowing freely by now.

‘There were a couple of cars that used to park near the crossing place for the school, so the kids couldn’t see the traffic easily. The owners received warning notices from the council. Rumour has it – which I believe – that Judy worked out who was doing it and put in a call. She doesn’t put up with what she calls “nonsense”.’

‘But you don’t know about anything she was currently worked up about?’

‘Not beyond the usual, no. You said it might be to do with Edward St Cyr. What makes the Boss think the two are connected?’

Rozie pursed her lips. The Queen had not been specific when she had outlined her concerns this morning. ‘The coincidence of timing, for a start. Judy was knocked over five days after Mr St Cyr disappeared. And it’s something to do with who Judy is. The Boss has this sixth sense for dangerous women.’

‘You think Judy’s dangerous?’

‘To the wrong person, maybe. You said she won’t put up with “nonsense”. She’ll take on anyone who threatens the school kids’ safety. Perhaps she took on someone with more at stake than she realised.’

‘And Mr St Cyr took on the same person?’

Rozie shrugged. ‘That’s one of the things we need to find out. If the police were worried, they’d be investigating already. I can’t raise the issue with them until we have more to go on. Maybe he and Judy weren’t exactly working together, but she discovered something that would make her know who to suspect when he disappeared. Or, as I say, maybe it’s nothing. We need more than feminine intuition. The Boss doesn’t like to do anything until she’s sure of her facts. Talking of which, do you know where the accident happened?’

‘Sure. I can show you, if you like.’

They finished their tea and took the dog, in her harness, for a walk past the row of cottages and a little tea shop, to the end of the road, which formed a T-junction with the main road through the village. Katie pointed out the sharp bend twenty yards to their right, and the place beyond it where Judy had been found.

‘She was on her way home from a WI meeting in West Newton,’ Katie said. ‘Funnily enough, it was to go over the arrangements for the Boss’s visit in a fortnight. One of her friends dropped her off back here afterwards. Judy usually got out by the Scout hut, near my cottage, and walked from there. The lane to her house is round the corner, see? The way she was lying, it was clear she was hit by a car travelling out of the village, so it wouldn’t have seen her until just before the impact.’

Rozie tried to see a way in which the car could have known in advance where Judy would be. She failed. If you wanted to stage something that looked like a genuine accident, this was the perfect place to do it.

‘She wasn’t found for at least fifteen minutes,’ Katie said. ‘Luckily, the woman who spotted her is the local GP so she got good care until the ambulance came. It could have been fatal if she’d been there much longer.’

‘Did she usually cross in that place?’

‘Probably. I’ve done it myself. You don’t exactly get rush hour traffic in Dersingham. You can normally hear cars coming a mile off, especially in winter. But if the car was going fast . . .’

‘Was there any CCTV?’

Katie laughed. ‘In north Norfolk? I think there’s a camera in Fakenham but I’m not sure. And nobody remembers anything out of the ordinary. If they did, I’m sure they’d have said something.’

Rozie stared back down the main road. It was difficult to imagine a car being parked far enough away to build up enough speed to do damage, and yet close enough to time its impact precisely. If it had suddenly revved up, surely it would have attracted attention, even in a sleepy village like this?

Katie carried on. ‘I know you’re going to ask if it’s possible to find out when the meetings are, and it is. They’re on the WI website, so any local who knew where to look could’ve worked out roughly when Judy would be coming back. But she often stayed on to chat to people. You wouldn’t be able to know exactly when she’d get here. And how would you guess when she’d cross the road if you couldn’t see her until you rounded the bend?’

‘Mmm,’ Rozie agreed. ‘You’d need someone loitering at the bend. They’d have to make a phone call to the driver just as Judy approached.’

‘Wouldn’t that be obvious?’

‘Not if they had earbuds in. It would look as if they were just muttering to themselves.’

‘I can ask if anyone spotted a loiterer,’ Katie offered.

Something had been puzzling Rozie. ‘How?’ she asked.

‘How what?’

‘How do you ask a village? How d’you know so much already?’

‘Oh!’ Katie smiled. ‘Well, you could just mention something in the queue at the Co-op. That usually does it. Or you mutter under your breath in the tea shop, or after church. But I use A Load of Balls.’

‘Sorry?’

Katie’s grin widened. ‘They’re a WhatsApp group of knitters. I joined a few months ago. Judy suggested it, not surprisingly. They incorporate the Sweary Stitchers, who do embroidery, and the Happy Hookers, who crochet. The Sweary Stitchers are the best. They can teach every stitch in the book, but they tend to use them for swear words on little samplers and patchwork. It gets the rage out of their system.’

‘There’s rage round here?’

Katie gave Rozie a piercing look. ‘Of course there is. Grief. Frustration. Getting ill. Growing old. There’s a lot of rage in the countryside. But turning it into samplers is really therapeutic. They have their meetings in different people’s houses, so it’s good for seeing other people’s taste in kitchens and furniture. Judy suggested the group to me, not surprisingly. Anyway, between them all, they know most things. That’s how I heard about the hit-and-run.’

‘What do they think happened?’

‘Oh, they honestly think it was an accident. Some idiot boy racer. Judy was wearing a dark coat and hat, which wasn’t very clever of her, especially on a dark winter evening, but you don’t necessarily think about neon and safety clothing when it’s a five-minute walk, do you? They’ve got their theories on what happened to Edward St Cyr, too, by the way.’

Rozie frowned. ‘You haven’t asked about that?’

Katie shook her head. ‘I didn’t need to. They’ve got theories about everything. The general consensus is that he isn’t dead at all. He somehow managed to amputate his hand – and to be fair, they know a few farmers who’ve done that by accident in various bits of farm machinery, so it’s not impossible – and he left it on the beach.’

‘Like leaving your clothes in a little pile?’

‘Exactly. So he could go off and start a new life. They’re fascinated by him. He’s like the local celebrity – apart from the Boss, of course, but she keeps her head down. He did the opposite. There’s nothing they don’t think him capable of.’

‘Even so . . . his own hand. That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?’

‘It’s extreme, whoever did it,’ Katie pointed out.

Chapter 15

After a decent night’s sleep, the Queen woke up with a sense of energy and purpose she hadn’t felt for a while. Today, William, Catherine and the great-grandchildren were due to visit. She tried not to rush through the box of Government memoranda, notes from the Foreign Office and other assorted paperwork, but an objective observer would have noticed that she read it faster than usual – starting as always with the papers at the bottom, on the basis that these were the ones the Cabinet Office least wanted her to see.

She was done with it all so quickly that there was time to fit in a ride. The first one she had the energy for since she arrived. She asked Rozie to accompany her. The Queen had always been impressed that a young woman who had grown up on a council estate in the middle of London had somehow found the resources to ride. Not only that, but Rozie had competed for the army. The girl had grit, which was good.

They met up at the stables before setting off together across the paddocks, where a light blanket of snow was marked with the tracks of hares and rabbits. The Queen thought it might be nice to bring little Prince George here later. But now she was grateful to have the opportunity to talk to Rozie undisturbed.

‘How did it go yesterday?’ she asked.

Rozie was equivocal. ‘Katie showed me where the hit-and-run happened. Either it really was an accident, or it was very cleverly staged.’ She explained about the crossing place.

‘So it would be difficult to do it deliberately?’

‘Yes, ma’am. You would need at least two people and some decent planning. Even so, it’s hard to see how you could get the timing right. I did wonder,’ Rozie added, ‘whether there might have been an accomplice standing by the edge of the road, ready to give Judy a nudge if necessary.’

The Queen nodded gravely. The scenario seemed to fit, in an odd sort of way, with the nature of Ned St Cyr’s murder as she understood it: sudden violence, masked by the careful impression that nothing unusual had happened at all.

‘Can you ask Katie to find out if Judy is being safely looked after in hospital? I assume she doesn’t know what it was that Judy was writing about?’

‘Not yet, although it might well have been drugs-related. Judy was definitely worried about drugs in the area. Katie’s going to make some discreet enquiries. She’s checking Judy’s social media accounts, too. It’s possible she mentioned something on Facebook, for example.’

‘Good.’

It astonished the Queen that so many people, even sensible middle-aged ones such as Judy Raspberry, chose to live their lives online. She flinched whenever her family’s private moments were shared without permission and dissected by strangers. Why would anyone willingly submit to this scrutiny? And yet millions did, and many of them obviously got comfort from it. She had tried to understand, but it was still beyond her. However, Rozie was adept at using it to their advantage when there was a problem to solve, such as this one, so for that she was grateful.

‘We might speed things up by gently finding out if Ned had approached the chief constable about any concerns,’ she suggested. ‘Mr Bloomfield runs the National Drugs Task Force.’

‘I’ll ask.’

Unless Ned was on the wrong side of a drug deal, the Queen thought. He had not been entirely law-abiding in his youth. But Anne was so certain he was anti-drugs, and the Queen trusted her daughter’s opinion.

‘From what I know of Ned, I can imagine him starting out along official channels, then getting frustrated and going it alone.’ She paused and turned her pony for home. Reluctantly, she added, ‘There’s one more thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘Julian Cassidy. I gather the police are interested in his activities. He obviously had some sort of quarrel with Ned. I doubt we have reason to be worried, but let me know if you hear anything.’

‘I’ll see what I can find out, ma’am,’ Rozie assured her.

The Queen returned to the house in a cheerful mood. She had no idea if the prickle under her skin was right, but at least she was doing something. The Cambridges would be here any minute, and that hideous cold was finally retreating. For the first time since her arrival her sinuses were clear and her body was, relatively speaking, free of aches and pains. She didn’t exactly skip down the corridor to the staircase to get changed out of her riding togs, but there was definitely a spring in her step.

Chapter 16

A quiet moment with her lady-in-waiting before lunch the next day brought with it the answer to one mystery, at least.

‘I think you ought to see this,’ Lady Caroline said.

The Queen looked up from a copy of Country Life, where she had been reading a rather poetic article about water voles. Lady Caroline had been going through the Queen’s personal correspondence to pick out letters and notes that required her attention. ‘Mmm?’

‘It’s from Astrid Westover, of all people.’ Lady Caroline made a face. ‘Would you like me to read it out to you? I’m tempted to do it in a funny voice, but that would be terribly rude. Especially after everything she’s been through. It’s quite tragic, of course.’

‘What is?’

‘The missing hand business. And she’s so very young really. I suppose that explains it. But honestly, you’d think she’d know better. She writes like something out of a Mills & Boon. Except they were better written. I used to love Mills & Boons at school. One of my friends wrote some of them under a nom de plume. I—’

‘Do get on with it, Caroline.’

‘Yes, ma’am. So sorry. Of course.’

Lady Caroline read aloud:

‘How astonishing,’ the Queen said.

‘Isn’t it?’

‘So that’s why the police weren’t unduly worried. They must have known.’

‘Lying low. I can’t say I blame her,’ Lady Caroline said. ‘All that press attention would be awful. Even so, she’s quite bold, isn’t she? Shall I do the usual? “Her Majesty would like me to thank you for your letter . . .”’

‘Yes. And do say, again, how sorry we are. I think that should be enough.’

But the letter became a topic of conversation again over a game of charades in the saloon after dinner. Lady Caroline had joined the family and guests, who by now included the young princesses and an eclectic assortment of old friends. While everyone was working on the film, book and TV titles to put in the hat, Lady Caroline turned to the Queen and said, ‘The cheek of that girl! Astrid Westover. I still can’t get over it. Can you?’

Lady Caroline had a loud voice, honed on many a lacrosse pitch in her youth, and everyone’s ears pricked up.

‘Ooh! Astrid? Who was marrying Ned St Cyr?’ Beatrice asked. ‘What did she say?’

‘She made it very clear,’ Lady Caroline suggested, ‘that she would like to visit Sandringham. Didn’t she, ma’am?’

‘Yes, she did, rather.’

‘I’ve never seen so many hints. I half expected her to say she was popping over in the morning for a chat.’

‘Oh, can we invite her?’ Eugenie asked. ‘She might know something about what happened.’

‘What a gruesome subject,’ the Queen said. ‘Especially for someone so close to Ned.’

‘But she wants to come. Perhaps she wants to talk about it.’

‘I should think she just wants a decent recce round the house and a chance to see us all doing the jigsaw,’ Philip observed, with great perspicacity, in the Queen’s opinion, especially given the chief constable’s recent visit.

‘You could always ask her and see,’ Beatrice suggested.

‘I must admit,’ Lady Caroline said, ‘I’d love to see if she’s as forward in person as she is on paper.’

‘I’m not sure it’s a trait I want to reward.’

‘You have to give her brownie points for chutzpah,’ Philip conceded.

‘Come on, Granny!’ Eugenie pleaded. ‘The poor woman’s bereaved. We’d be helping. Could she come soon? We’ve only got a few more days before we’re due at the chalet.’

The Queen intended to remain firm. She did not invite people to join the family just because they had expressed an interest in doing so. If she did, she would need a place the size of several Wembley Stadiums. However, she was an indulgent grandmother. Perhaps vestiges of her jealousy of Georgina St Cyr’s closeness to Ned remained. Before the last port decanter and cocktail trolley had circulated, she had somehow agreed to let the family ‘help’.

In hiding as she was, Astrid Westover’s diary was otherwise empty. She arrived for morning coffee forty-eight hours after being invited, before the young princesses headed off for their skiing holiday. She emerged from her car wearing a multi-hued faux fur coat that the girls instantly recognised from a popular fashion brand created by one of their friends, and paused with her back to the house for a moment, unaware that the family were watching from one of the windows in the saloon.

‘I think she’s taking selfies,’ Eugenie said.

‘Someone will have to tell her not to post them.’

When she entered the saloon, the Queen was fascinated to see that, close up, she looked as flawless as an airbrushed model in a magazine. Whatever makeup she was wearing, it seemed to smooth her face into doll-like simplicity. Her forehead was unnaturally unlined and her lips had the fish-like appearance that the Queen was increasingly noticing among her younger female acquaintances. Sophie Wessex had told her this was a ‘trout pout’, and the Queen had yet to be convinced that the exaggerated contours were preferable to one’s natural flesh and bone. She wondered what Astrid looked like underneath. However, the girl had great poise and, taking in the roomful of waiting royals, she sank into a deep curtsey.

‘Your Majesty,’ she murmured, in a deep, contralto voice that the Queen had not expected. ‘Thank you so much for the invitation. I brought you jam.’

Astrid dug around in the basket-like handbag she had brought with her and handed two jars of something rather gloopy and disconcertingly violet to the nearest footman. Like many before her, she must have read that Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, had won over the family with her first Christmas present of home-made jam. Many was the jar the Queen had received since. She was rather wary of them. The thing was, Catherine was really rather good at making jam, and that was a key feature.

‘So this is where Ned grew up.’ The contralto voice vibrated with emotion, as Astrid raised her eyes to the tapestries on the walls, the minstrels’ gallery, the royal portraits. ‘Do you know, even just being in this room, I can feel Ned’s presence?’

The Queen saw Philip’s eyebrows rise by about a millimetre. She hoped her family would behave themselves.

‘Well, he spent a little bit of time here. A very long time ago.’

Astrid continued to drink in the room, squealing slightly when her eyes lighted on the grand piano.

‘There’s the jigsaw! You still have one! Ned told me all about it. He adored Sandringham. It was such a special part of his childhood.’

‘How well did you know him?’ Philip asked. ‘I mean, how long did you know him? He wasn’t always a fan of ours.’

‘Wasn’t he?’ Astrid looked surprised. ‘I’m sure he was. He talked about you a lot. He said you were brilliant farmers. Very forward-thinking especially for people of your generation. He said sometimes the older farmers are the best, because you’ve seen everything.’

Philip and the Queen exchanged a look that Astrid didn’t catch.

‘Would you like some coffee?’ the Queen asked. ‘I think it’s ready in the drawing room.’

It was, along with a selection of freshly made biscuits and pastries, and the remaining guests, who were as keen and curious to see Astrid as she was to see them. Soon, she was sitting at one of the card tables, nibbling at some lavender shortbread biscuits and effectively holding court.

‘Ned said you’re doing interesting things with the estate,’ she said to Prince Philip. ‘To make farming more sustainable, I mean.’

‘Did he notice?’

‘Oh, yes. He was very curious. He grew up with the farm at Ladybridge, of course. But Abbottswood wasn’t the same at all. The land is all wood and wetland, and Ned couldn’t bear to chop the trees down. Some of them have been there for four hundred years.’

Philip nodded. ‘I’ve been saying as much. So he had this rewilding idea.’

‘Actually, I was the one who suggested rewilding to him,’ Astrid said. ‘I heard all about it on a work trip to Europe. Ned looked into it and he was so excited. It was our way of connecting with the land spiritually, you know?’

There were general non-committal noises round the room.

‘He wanted something for his children to be proud of. That’s why I was so certain the police had the wrong person when they arrested his son. I met Jack at Abbottswood when he came down to talk to Ned about the project. He was the sweetest guy, so supportive of what we were trying to do. It was really beautiful. I was hoping he might come and work with us.’

‘I don’t understand. I thought he hated his father?’ the Queen said.

‘They had a strained relationship,’ Astrid admitted, ‘but Ned was working hard to build bridges. We did a lot of therapy together at this fabulous retreat in Kerala last year. He wanted to reach out to all his children, and grandchildren, too. When he knew Jack’s girlfriend was pregnant it changed everything. It’s all about what you hand on, isn’t it? We wanted it to be a place of growth. Nature was in charge. Ned was very Zen. You should have seen him do the lotus position.’

‘I’m profoundly glad I didn’t,’ Philip said, with feeling.

‘I heard he was mellowing,’ the Queen suggested. ‘So Lord Mundy’s daughter told me.’

‘Oh, yes, he was! That was lovely. So sweet of them to invite him to Lady Mundy’s funeral. His mother’s buried at Ladybridge and it meant he could go and visit her, which was more important to him than he let on, I think. He tried to reach out to everyone, really. And he wanted rewilding to put north Norfolk on the map.’

‘I rather thought Sandringham did that,’ Philip observed.

‘But it was so difficult. People just don’t understand. Every project has teething troubles. I mean, there were incidents with the boar and beavers and the deer, but they were accidents. Ned didn’t mean them to escape. If you knew how many thousands he spent trying to keep them in! Matt Fisher and his wife did everything in their power to shut the project down. I don’t think they forgave Ned for the boar digging their lawns up just before their daughter’s birthday party. They just didn’t get it, Ned treasured the land. The boar are transforming the landscape at Abbottswood. Or at least, they were, until we lost them.’

‘I bet they were,’ Philip muttered.

‘The beavers were a bit of a mistake because it’s astonishing how easily they get past any enclosure, but they created this beautiful sort of wetland area before they escaped. You should come and visit. Except—’ Astrid broke off. ‘I don’t know what’s happening to it now. I had this whole brand set up to market the project on social media. To get a fan base going, you know? We were even in early talks with Channel 4. Ned was supposed to pick me up from the airport and drive me to Abbottswood so we could shoot some videos to show them. We texted about it the night before. He said he couldn’t wait to see me . . .’

‘Did he really just disappear?’ Eugenie asked.

Astrid nodded. ‘I wasn’t worried at first. I kept thinking I was about to see him any second. I rang his mobile from the airport. He’d warned me it might be out of power, which it was, so I rang Abbottswood . . . the same. There isn’t a landline at the flat. I was kind of pissed off with him then. Which is just so . . . kind of . . . tragic now.’

‘No, it’s understandable,’ Beatrice agreed. ‘So what happened?’

This was ‘being helpful’, the Queen assumed.

‘I got a taxi to the house and I was so sure he’d be in the kitchen, making supper and sorry for forgetting. But he wasn’t there. The dogs were howling. The sitting room was completely trashed and I assumed there must have been burglars . . . I had the most awful, awful visions, but it was just the dogs. Ned must have forgotten to shut the kitchen door properly and he hadn’t put their toys out for them. Gwennie goes absolutely crazy without her bunny. And they were starving, poor things.’

‘Had he just left them for all that time?’ Eugenie asked. She, too, was a dog person.

The Queen had been wondering about this. She knew it was absolutely not the most important thing, but surely he hadn’t just abandoned them?

‘No! They’re used to being alone at night sometimes. The cleaner normally feeds them and lets them out in the mornings if we’re not there. Ned had left a note on the table, but it wasn’t her day. He wasn’t thinking straight. Anyway, I went outside, thinking he might have gone to check on the deer or something and fallen over or . . . I don’t know. It was pitch black. I couldn’t see anything. I called and called. The next day I waited, but nothing, so in the afternoon I called the police. They told me not to worry, but of course I did worry. I took his spare key to the flat and drove up that night, but there was no sign of him, just breakfast things in the sink, as if he expected to come back and wash them up. Those texts on my phone . . . They’re the last thing I have. I keep reading them over and over.’

Astrid stopped suddenly. Had her facial muscles been able to express emotion, it would have been dismay. The Queen felt slightly guilty she had underestimated the strength of the bond between Ned and his young fiancée. There was real affection there, and a sense of common purpose. She knew how that felt.

‘It must be very difficult,’ she sympathised.

Astrid nodded. ‘It helps that I have the dogs. They miss him as much as I do. Gwennie, she’s the setter – he always has one to remind him of his mother – she won’t be consoled. She just lies there, looking at me. They all know something’s wrong.’

Several pairs of royal eyes looked at Astrid sympathetically, because they completely got it about the dogs.

‘Something must have been eating him up. The way he was speeding up to London and he promised me he wouldn’t anymore because he had so many points on his licence and he couldn’t live without the car.’

‘Did he seem stressed out?’ Beatrice asked.

‘No! But I guess he must have been. Maybe he was trying to hide it from me. I mean, I know he had a lot on his mind. I assumed it was to do with the breakout of the boar because there had been the horrible business with Mrs Fisher’s cockapoo.’

‘Goodness!’ the Queen said. ‘What happened?’

‘Oh, that was awful. The boar broke out about a month ago, and they were just rummaging about in the bushes, like they do, not doing any harm to anyone, but the dog came over to investigate and wouldn’t leave them alone and in the end . . . Well, they’re wild animals, after all. They do what they do.’ Astrid shrugged. Then she noticed several pairs of royal eyes now staring at her in horror. She blushed. ‘It wasn’t their fault, is what I mean. Apparently, they still see dogs as wolves. It’s a protective instinct.’ She stuck out her chin. ‘And that awful man from Muncaster threatened to kill him, which was so unfair. Ned was devastated about the dog, naturally. He adored them.’

At which point Astrid did something none of them expected. Her eyes welled up and she cried ugly tears that dislodged her mascara, unable to help herself.

‘I . . . I’m s-sorry!’ she gasped. ‘I don’t know what I’m d-doing!’ She tried to cover her wet cheeks with the back of a clenched hand. A footman stepped forward with a napkin for her to use as a handkerchief, but she shook her head. ‘I’ll be fine.’ She took a deep breath, managed a weak, shaky smile and glanced across at the nearest large object, which was a screen of Venetian fans. ‘Those are lovely. Do you collect them? Are they eighteenth-century?’

At that moment, the Queen was reminded sharply of Astrid’s mother, Moira, who had the same disconcerting core of steel. Moira had always dealt with her late husband’s famous drinking habit by pretending it didn’t exist. She had clearly brought up her daughter in a similar vein. But the Queen could see that behind the carefully filled façade, poor Astrid was devastated. She was clearly devoted to Ned, and the life they had planned together. She would have made a good match for him, despite the age gap. Perhaps, under her influence, they might even have found their way into Sandringham life again. Another party organised by Ned St Cyr would have been quite something.

She didn’t share any of these reflections with Astrid. They would hardly have been helpful. But she offered to ask the chef to share the lavender shortbread recipe with her, and assured her that they were very much looking forward to sampling the jam.

Chapter 17

Sir Simon and Rozie were both working late. Last January, Rozie remembered, he had tended to switch off his monitor at about 5 p.m. before calling his wife in London for a chat, making the most of the winter holiday lull before everything ramped up again in February. This year, Lady Holcroft was still in Scotland, but that didn’t explain the worried look on the private secretary’s face and the large pile of reading material he was working his way through.

‘Anything interesting?’ she asked, poking her head around his door.

‘Not unless you find the supplementary information to the Government’s appeal to the Supreme Court against R. Miller versus the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union interesting,’ he said, rubbing his eyes. He looked up. ‘It’s all extremely important, but it stopped being interesting eight hours ago. I’m lost in Euro-speak. But I’ll get there.’

‘Do you need to?’

‘I do. The PM tried to invoke the royal prerogative to trigger our departure. Her whole “Brexit means Brexit” thing. We rather care how the royal prerogative works. But in this case, Brexit means . . .’ He indicated the two-foot high pile of papers on his desk. ‘I’m not sure anyone knows exactly what it means at the moment. Meanwhile, the PM’s secretary rang. She wants to talk. This is ominous.’

‘Why?’ Rozie asked.

‘Because it means she’s been thinking over Christmas.’

‘Isn’t that a good thing?’

‘Not necessarily, no. Prime ministers with too much time on their hands tend to have bad ideas and discuss them with the wrong people, thus rendering them infinitely worse.’

‘I’d have thought the rest and relaxation would do her good,’ Rozie ventured.

Sir Simon scoffed. ‘If she rested or relaxed, I might agree with you. But they never do. Or at least, not since Macmillan. They call in their special advisers for table suppers and sometimes their supporters for grand dinners, though I’m not sure how much of the latter she does. They game every scenario and overthink everything. If the Boss had her way, she’d take each one out fishing so they could kick back and get a little perspective.’

‘I can’t see Theresa May fishing,’ Rozie said with a grin.

Sir Simon nodded and sighed. ‘That’s the trouble. Neither can I. I sense this pile of papers is going to get higher over the next few weeks. I need to have some clue what I’m talking about.’

‘Do you want me to read them for you? Or some of them at least?’

‘No, I’ll do it. I have a few meetings lined up in town next week. I might as well look as if I know what I’m talking about. You go home.’

He gave her a friendly smile. Rozie smiled back, but she felt excluded. She had enjoyed her brief moment at the top of the Private Office food chain, when she got to read all the international intelligence. Now her job felt more mundane. She couldn’t even entertain herself with Henry, who had rotated duties with another officer for a couple of weeks. She wished Sir Simon goodnight and headed out.

Rozie’s accommodation was in a Victorian lodge a fifteen-minute walk from the house. It had been used to house kings, queens, dukes and mistresses over the years, and most of them, Rozie thought, must have found its dark walls and heavy furniture as oppressive as she did. However, her room was large, the bed was comfortable, and anything could beat the tiny boxes they had given her in the army.

Currently, the two overflow guests who shared it with her were a classical composer and his opera singer wife. They were down for a few days and spent the evenings playing party games and treating their royal hosts to classical music and old Beatles pop tunes on the piano in the saloon. Which meant that Rozie had the place to herself. She planned to use the large mahogany dining table to spread out her notes on the Queen’s calendar for the next few months, so she could colour-code the events according to how much preparation they needed. What happens in Sandringham stays in Sandringham, but a lot of the time it was just paperwork.

The job took longer than expected. She lost track of time but knew it must be around midnight. The playlist of Fela Kuti and Nina Simone playing quietly on her phone in the background had repeated itself at least a dozen times. The wind was up tonight and something outside was flapping with a dull, irregular rhythm. Distracted, she pictured ropes loosening. It took her back to her army days, when everything had to be battened down tight. Eventually, she couldn’t bear the distraction any longer. She took the heaviest torch she could find in a cupboard in the hall, grabbed her coat, shoved her feet into the first boots that would fit and went out to investigate.

The lodge shared a garden with a little cottage that had once been used by the servants of the royal guests. Rozie knew it had been given to the bean counter while he looked for somewhere more permanent. She had tried twice, now, to talk to him about his story of the scuffle in the car park, but either he wasn’t at home or he was avoiding her. Rozie remembered the way he had stared at her at the shoot. She hadn’t been worried at the time; now things were more complicated.

The noise seemed to be coming from an open lean-to with a cast-iron roof attached to the cottage. Shining her torch inside, Rozie saw that it housed some rusting garden equipment, a small boat under canvas and a vehicle under a plastic tarpaulin. The problem was obvious: the tarpaulin had come loose on one side. Rozie wondered why the frantic flapping sound didn’t drive Cassidy as mad as it was driving her. The sweep of her torchlight revealed a bungee cord lying on the ground that must have been used to hold the cover down, stretched under the car from one side to the other. Without it, the loose plastic revealed a modern Land Rover Freelander four-wheel drive.

Rozie was surprised by this. Plenty of her army friends had kept vehicles at home this way – but usually because the car was sporty and delicate, or because it was old and liable to rust. This one was neither. She was surprised that Julian wasn’t driving it. It would make much more sense on these roads than the little Nissan she’d seen parked at the front, which had the look of a hire car. Why keep a decent vehicle under canvas if you . . .?

Before she finished the thought, her torch was lighting up the pristine driver’s side of the engine grille. She unhooked the remaining bungee cord, pulled back the tarpaulin and shone her torch on the Freelander offside corner. Her heart rate leaped as she saw the way the headlamp unit jutted at an unexpected angle. The whole corner of the chassis was crushed, and the bumper panel below it was hanging half off. There was a large, crumpled dent in the bonnet. A dent, Rozie thought, about the size of a small, adult woman.

The headlights of a distant car lit up the treetops as it approached. Rozie could hear its engine above the wind. She reached into her coat pocket for her phone to take a picture of the damage – but her hand found nothing. The car drew closer. Her phone, meanwhile, must be on the dining table where she had left it, playing ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ to an empty room.

Rozie turned off her torch and waited. The car moved on. She was about to head back to the lodge when she heard pounding feet, and looked round to see a large black shape heading through the darkness for her at speed. Shit! He had a dog. Of course he did. Everybody had a dog round here. It stopped in front of her and barked fit to wake the dead. She tensed every muscle, waiting for Julian to appear.

Except, he didn’t come. Rozie noticed for the first time that the back door to the cottage was wide open. A thin light poured out from an inner room. The old Labrador seemed agitated. She could have sworn that, if anything, it was asking her to come inside.

Given what she had just found, common sense said to run and call the police. However, there was something wrong about the way that back door was wide open in the dead of winter. Her army training told her to assess the situation for risk, and investigate.

The curtains to the room beside the kitchen were only partly drawn. Torch in hand, her senses on hyper-alert, Rozie crept towards the window and peered through. The room beyond was similar to Katie’s living room in size, lit by a single table lamp with a wonky shade. The floor near the lamp was littered with dirty plates and a couple of empty wine bottles on their sides. She could just make out the stockinged feet of a man lying prone behind a battered sofa. The dog had gone back inside to sit beside him.

Rozie cautiously followed. The open door led into a small kitchen, where a shotgun lay on a table next to a neat array of cleaning rods and oils. More empty wine bottles neatly lined the skirting board in double rows. Beyond them, an open door gave on to the living room. Rozie saw the man as soon as she entered. She crouched down by his head and took in the pale, unshaven face.

So this was Julian Cassidy. Rozie recognised him now. The last time she had seen him, he had had a light beard and he had been rifle shooting beside her at the Queen’s Prize at Bisley, about five years ago. She wasn’t surprised he’d remembered her: black women tended to stand out in the rarified circles of rifle competitions. White men not so much. Cassidy had been friendly, she remembered, and as handy with a rifle as she was. Even though they hadn’t won, they had celebrated hard that day.

She placed her fingers against his neck and found a faintly beating pulse. Whatever had happened to him, he wasn’t going to do her any harm, tonight at least.

Chapter 18

The Queen looked up from the last paper in her boxes and watched as a swirling, eddying cloud of knot birds made its way across a pale grey sky. The little sandpipers, named after King Canute of advancing tide fame, always amazed her with the complicated patterns they created overhead, forming living shapes that bent and melted in front of one’s eyes. They were a reminder of the limits of a sovereign’s powers, and also the great outdoors, and the fact that she wasn’t in it. The latter was a situation that she decided to remedy.

Along the corridor, the main reception rooms were quiet. The family and their guests, it seemed, were all outside already. She had assumed they were all on a happy hack across the fields, only for Mrs Maddox to inform her that the younger ones had gone shopping in Burnham Market. The constant desire to be in small, enclosed, overheated spaces was something she had never fully understood, when one could be spending time instead with animals. No matter. It gave her an excellent opportunity to visit the stud again.

As she knotted her headscarf under her chin in preparation for leaving the house, she wondered idly whether poor, nervous Arthur Raspberry would be there, and thought back to his redoubtable little sister, Ivy. She had been at the beach at Snettisham, of course, the fateful day of the hand washing up on the shore. The Raspberrys and Snettisham . . . Judy was not the only member of the family to see something interesting on the beach. The Queen pictured the scene after the storm, with the plastic bag bobbing on the water, and the terrified girl. That was the day the drugs washed up, too, not all of which were recovered. Sir Simon had mentioned that a package had gone missing from the bigger bag. But after Ivy’s discovery, the beach would have been full of police officers and forensic teams. That mental image gave the Queen pause for thought.

It was possible. Unlikely, but possible. The more she thought it through, the more possible it seemed. Tightening the headscarf knot in place, she headed outside with greater purpose.

The Land Rover was waiting for her in the forecourt, but her chief personal protection officer was not. Normally, when she was preparing to go out, he lurked outside, ready to accompany her in the car or follow on as required, but there was no sign of him She turned to the nearest footman.

‘Do you know where Chief Inspector Jackson is?’

‘Do you mean Inspector Depiscopo, ma’am? He took over your protection from Mr Jackson yesterday. I’ll find out for you.’

The Queen berated herself for forgetting. Her PPOs regularly rotated shifts and Jackson had gone back to London yesterday. Jackson, she had known for years, but Depiscopo was new. He was part of a Government scheme to save money by rotating officers across a range of VIPs. So far it had annoyed all concerned and cost a fortune in additional overtime, because traditional royal PPOs didn’t think of their role in strict terms of ‘on’ and ‘off’, but the new policemen definitely did. Nor did they understand where to be and when, and how one liked to work. She waited impatiently for a couple of minutes and decided to drive the Land Rover by herself.

‘He knows where to find me,’ she said tersely.

The footman gulped and nodded. Depiscopo wouldn’t be making that mistake again.

At the stud, the Queen spent some pleasant time watching the mares with their foals in the Walled Garden. Like her, the foals had an official birthday in addition to their real one, and theirs was always the first of January. One of the jobs of a breeder was to encourage them to be conceived in time to be born as early in the year before as possible. Estimate’s foal, for example, had been born in the early spring, which was ideal. He would be well established before he raced as a two-year-old – assuming he was good enough to do it. Judging from his proportions, his movement and that intelligent flick of his ears, she had high hopes for him. But her thoughts were elsewhere this morning.

She was pleased to see that Arthur was among the grooms. As they prepared to walk the horses back to the yard, she asked him to stay behind, near the statue of Persimmon, whose winnings on the track for her great-grandfather had paid for the magnificent Walled Garden itself. The poor boy looked chalk-white with lack of sleep. She had seen him this way at the stables, too. At the time, it seemed natural that he should be anxious about his aunt and his little sister; now she wondered if it was something more.

‘How is Mrs Raspberry?’ she asked. ‘Is there any news?’

Arthur looked astonished to be asked.

‘She came out of the coma a couple of days ago, ma’am. But she’s got no memory of that day. She’s covered in bruises. Dad didn’t want us to go and see her, but we had to. I mean we wanted to.’

‘Well done. I’m sure it must have been very comforting for her.’

‘She looked . . . bad, ma’am. Thin. Her face all purple and yellow . . . And, you know, tubes and things.’

‘Give her time. She’ll heal. She might lose her confidence a little,’ the Queen added, having seen enough riding accidents to know. ‘But you can help her by keeping her company. I sense you’ll be good at it.’

‘Er, OK. I’m not sure about that.’ The troubled look on his face was evidence of a confidence crisis of his own.

‘I’ve been thinking about your sister’s discovery on the beach,’ the Queen went on.

She saw his whole body tense. ‘What, ma’am? I mean, why? I mean . . .?’

‘I wondered if she had gone there alone that day. It’s a very long walk to Snettisham from West Newton. That is where you live, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘So I wondered if someone had driven her. And they might have been on the beach with her. And they might have seen . . . all sorts of things . . . while they were there. Before the police arrived, I mean.’

The poor boy was practically blue. The Queen had considered that it was three to one she was probably wrong, but now it was odds-on she had pictured the scene correctly.

‘I-I dunno. Maybe someone drove,’ he said. ‘I can ask.’

‘Do you drive, Arthur?’

He tried to swallow. His throat was dry. ‘I . . . Sometimes.’

‘Around that time, a packet of drugs went missing from the bag that washed up. The police know, because of the way the bag was packed. You’ve probably heard about it because I understand they’ve been trying to track it down.’

He stared.

‘I suppose someone might have come across it before Ivy got there . . .’ she suggested.

He nodded eagerly.

‘. . . But it was early in the morning, so perhaps they didn’t. Anyway, whoever found the bag acted rashly, on the spur of the moment. They made a very stupid choice. Perhaps they were coerced.’

‘I don’t know what you’re—’

‘The thing is, I do hope that it wasn’t anyone who worked for me. Because that would make things very difficult. One likes to give people second chances. But if they have drugs on them, or hidden somewhere . . .’

Arthur’s mobile face was a picture of panic. If he was seeking to go into a life of crime, he was singularly ill-equipped for it. The Queen carried on.

‘On Sunday, I’ll be attending the eleven o’clock service at Flitcham. My protection officers always sweep it very thoroughly before I arrive. If something were to be left there anonymously, it would be found. I think it belongs with the rest of the contents of that bag, in police custody, out of harm’s way,’ she rounded up. ‘Don’t you?’

He nodded.

‘I like to give people second chances, but not third ones. I’m glad we’ve had this little chat, Arthur.’

He stared at her wordlessly, before accidentally curtseying and bolting for the yard.

‘Will he do it?’ Rozie asked.

They were supposed to be discussing the Queen’s calendar. Rozie had noticed some interesting potential issues with the schedule. However, as so often during this visit, they had got sidetracked.

‘We shall see. I might have got the wrong end of the stick,’ the Queen said. ‘He couldn’t have been looking at me like that out of politeness. But I think so. Yes?’

‘I just can’t believe . . .’

Rozie said it as respectfully as she could, but she still couldn’t finish the sentence. The Queen could tell she didn’t believe one might suspect someone had stolen a packet of drugs, and was giving them a get-out clause.

‘If I’m right about him, and the packet were to be discovered, his career will be quite over before it’s begun. He’s a promising groom and a hopeless criminal. I really don’t think it was his idea.’

‘If it was someone else’s,’ Rozie said, ‘won’t they mind when the drugs are handed in?’

The Queen had considered this. ‘He can truthfully say he didn’t have a choice. And nobody has lost out – the drugs were found accidentally, after all. But I certainly don’t want one of my employees hanging on to them.’

‘No, ma’am. I see that.’

‘I do hope he has the good sense to wipe his fingerprints off the packet. Anyway, enough of that. How have you got on?’

‘Katie has some good news,’ Rozie said.

‘Excellent.’

‘She tried to see Mrs Raspberry in the hospital but it was impossible,’ Rozie said. ‘She’s on a special ward and visitors are tightly controlled. She’s pretty safe for now.’

‘Thank goodness. What else?’

‘I’ve made some progress. Not the type you were hoping for, though, ma’am.’

‘Oh?’

Rozie realised this had become a bit of a refrain. She told the Queen about the discovery of the dented Freelander. And the fact that she had found Julian Cassidy, practically comatose with drink, on his living room floor, surrounded by empty wine bottles.

‘The bean counter?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

The Queen tried to puzzle it out. This was a shock. Several shocks. What did he have to do with Judy Raspberry? He was the one person she was sure was not involved. And all those bottles . . .

‘Have you reported it? The car, I mean?’ she asked.

‘There’s no point,’ Rozie said. ‘The police already know. He was clever. I found out he reported it himself, two days later. He said he’d hit a deer that suddenly leaped out at him on the road to Muncaster, and it had made him crash into a tree. The second crash was real enough. He got Helena Fisher to back him up. She said she was driving the other way and saw it happen. They even called someone out to try and find the deer and put it down humanely.’

‘No injured deer was found, I assume,’ the Queen said.

‘No, ma’am.’

‘You saw the damage to the car. Does his story seem plausible?’

Rozie sighed. ‘Just about, I suppose. I don’t believe it, though.’

‘And he’d been drinking?’

‘Heavily. And repeatedly. You don’t get through all those bottles in one night.’

The Queen grimaced. ‘First the scuffle with Ned. Now the wine. We had high hopes for the bean counter.’

‘If he did hit Mrs Raspberry, I don’t see how he could have done it deliberately.’

‘Hmmm,’ the Queen said. ‘Not alone, certainly.’ And yet, he seemed to be drinking himself into oblivion. She was reminded of young Arthur for a moment: another hopeless criminal who couldn’t live with himself. Still, why on earth would he do it?

‘There’s something else, ma’am. On the subject of Helena Fisher.’

‘Hmm?’

‘The police found the body of a wild boar buried on her estate yesterday. It was shot with a rifle, right between the eyes.’

‘One of Ned’s boar?’ the Queen asked. ‘I gather they’d gone missing.’

‘It looks as though they escaped into Muncaster’s woods. Helena Fisher says she was walking with her dogs and one of them disturbed the boar somehow, and it didn’t survive the attack.’

‘The cockapoo,’ the Queen said to herself.

‘She was worried for the others. And herself. She admitted asking Mr Cassidy to help her, because her husband was away and he was the first person she thought of who has a rifle. They apparently hunted the boar down together the next day. I know he’s good enough to have done it, and not that many people are.’

‘Why didn’t she simply get Ned to take his animals back?’

‘She said she didn’t trust him not to let them escape again. Relations had broken down. She was angry and upset and did the first thing that occurred to her. That’s her story, anyway. Cassidy backs it up.’

‘They’re quite a double act, those two,’ the Queen said thoughtfully.

Chapter 19

The house party at Sandringham got through a few bottles of its own that evening. After breakfast the next morning, while several of the guests were sleeping it off, the Queen took the dogs for a walk on her own so she could think. A circuit of the lakes generally suited this purpose. They weren’t large – more oversized ponds, really – and had been created with islands, rockeries and rich planting, so the eye would always have something to admire. Her great-grandfather once said he would have liked to be a landscape gardener if he hadn’t been king. The Queen did not personally agree, but thought what a jolly job it must be: out in the fresh air much of the time, surrounded by nature, making things. She had yet to meet a landscape gardener whose company she didn’t enjoy.

Yesterday, she’d asked Mrs Maddox whether there were any rumours about Mrs Fisher and the bean counter. Astrid Westover had suggested ‘the awful man from Muncaster’ threatened Ned because of the death of Mrs Fisher’s cockapoo. The Queen had assumed Astrid was alluding to Matt Fisher, but now she wondered if the ‘awful man’ was Cassidy, and Astrid had been referring to the scuffle in the pub car park that Sir Simon had mentioned. It is quite an emotional involvement, to shoot a boar and then threaten a man because the animal has caused the death of your ex-employer’s wife’s pet dog. Then to hide a damaged car and get that same ex-employer’s wife to confirm when the accident happened. The Queen was starting to see Cassidy with new eyes.

The housekeeper had readily confirmed the Queen’s suspicions. According to the servants’ hall at Muncaster, the affair had started in the summer. Apparently it was in revenge for Mr Fisher’s relationship with his art adviser. The Queen reflected that one missed all the country gossip when one was in London. Although, of course, the city was a rumour-factory of its own.

So, Cassidy and Mrs Fisher were much more than casual acquaintances. It must indeed have been Cassidy who threatened Ned over the poor cockapoo. The Queen thought about Ned’s dogs, too, and the chaos in the sitting room at Abbottswood after his disappearance, which the police seemed unconcerned by. Then there was the telephone call to Julian Cassidy for no obvious reason, the day before he disappeared. None of it connected and it was quite exhausting to try and fit it all together. The only reason she had got involved at all was because she felt certain that the hit-and-run on Judy Raspberry was important, and that it didn’t have anything to do with the goings-on at Muncaster. One liked to think one’s neighbours and staff were not homicidal. Now, if anything, she had more evidence than the chief constable that they might be. Perhaps she should leave it to the police after all. But people kept telling her things.

She was halfway round the ponds when she was surprised to see a young person of indeterminate sex in jeans and a hoodie walking rapidly towards her. Closer up, the flash of a blue fringe under the hood reminded her that this was the redoubtable Ivy, Arthur’s sister, whose views on royalty the Queen had not forgotten.

‘Good morning,’ she said, somewhat stiffly. Young people, or old people for that matter, tended not to run up to her at will.

The girl was slightly out of breath. She grinned. ‘I found you! Great! Hi! . . . Your Majesty.’ She dropped into a belated curtsey that was more of a knee-bend. ‘Can I join you for a sec?’

‘I suppose you can,’ the Queen agreed. She narrowed her eyes. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be in school?’

The girl gave her a brazen stare.

‘Inset day.’

The Queen wasn’t sure exactly what that was, but could tell from the tilt of Ivy’s chin that it wasn’t true anyway.

‘Willow’s looking a bit tired, isn’t she?’ Ivy said. ‘D’you want us to slow down so she can manage?’

‘Do you know my dogs?’

Ivy looked surprised. ‘Of course I do. I help walk them sometimes. That footman who usually does it likes to have a crafty cigarette. He doesn’t think they need much exercise, but I do. I give them an extra ten minutes for him.’

‘I had no idea,’ the Queen said, nonplussed.

‘Look, don’t tell him I told you. Anyway, that wasn’t why I wanted to talk to you. I know what you think about my brother.’

‘I’m not sure you—’

‘He’s a diamond. You probably think he’s a bit iffy because of me. I was rude to you at Christmas and I didn’t mean it and I’m sorry. I just go off a bit at times. Arthur really loves his job. He’s good at it. He needs it. He doesn’t do drugs, ma’am, seriously.’

‘How did you think I—?’

‘I heard him telling the chickens at home. Don’t ask. You and me talk to the horses. He talks to the chickens, OK?’

‘What did he tell them?’

‘You think he stole those drugs from the beach and he took them, but he had to, ma’am. He was with this stupid boy called Josh who was in his year at school. I’m telling you ’cause you don’t tell anyone, right?’

‘It depends,’ the Queen said cautiously.

‘Well, you can’t tell them this because if you did, Josh would kill me.’

‘Really?’

‘OK, so not literally kill me,’ Ivy amended. ‘He’s just a dopehead who thinks he’s Jay-Z. But I can trust you. You know about the packet and you could’ve . . . Well, Arthur could be in jail now or something. Josh literally told him to look after it for a bit, till the heat died down. You saw what it did to Arthur. He can’t even sleep. He’s terrified of drugs.’

‘That was rather my impression. Did Arthur tell the chickens all this?’

‘No, not about Josh. I saw them on the beach together with the bag, after I found the hand. When I was on my way to tell them about it and give Josh’s puppy back to him, before it ate something stupid and killed itself.’

‘Is he a friend of yours?’ the Queen asked. There was a heat to Ivy’s tone that suggested something more than mere acquaintance.

‘No way! He’s a creep. Auntie Judy caught him dealing on the beach. She was writing a piece about it ’cause the police weren’t doing anything. She told me to stay away from him last year. Should’ve listened. Josh is fit, but he’s useless,’ she added finally. ‘I liked him once. He took me to the hides and said he wanted to show me the birds . . .’

Her voice tailed off and she stared up at the turrets and chimneys of the house in the distance ahead of them. The Queen sensed she wasn’t really looking. A pall of sadness hung over her. The Queen had seen it many times before and it bore all the hallmarks of young love gone wrong. Josh was a love rat. So that was what went on in the hides – or at least part of it.

‘I should’ve expected it, I s’pose,’ Ivy went on, moodily. ‘He takes after his dad. Maybe it’s the dad Mum’s worried about. It makes sense.’ She grimaced. ‘Him being a mass murderer.’

‘What?’ The Queen wondered if she’d misheard. ‘I don’t think you mean that, surely?’

‘I totally do. He works on the turkey farm on the road to King’s Lynn. They slaughter them in their thousands before Christmas. Josh laughed at me about it. He knows how I feel.’

This, too, was not quite what the Queen had been expecting. Though perhaps it should have been. Local Lotharios and turkey farmers. They were hardly the drug barons and people traffickers she had been anticipating.

‘I hope you don’t apply your “mass murderer” label to all livestock farmers,’ the Queen said lightly, mindful that she was one herself.

Ivy missed the connection, or didn’t care. ‘I do. That’s why I’m vegan. That, and because it’s better for you. Mum kept saying I’d grow up stunted. I’m the fittest in the family.’ The Queen was slightly piqued about the mass murderer suggestion. Vegans could be very aggressive in their views.

‘Not everyone wants to eat that way or knows how to,’ she said.

‘Ignorance is no excuse,’ Ivy said dismissively. ‘They should educate themselves on what happens in abattoirs.’

‘Abattoirs are a lot kinder than a fox in a chicken coop,’ the Queen countered. ‘Or would you have foxes turn vegetarian, too?’

‘It’s in their nature,’ Ivy protested.

‘And not ours?’

‘We grew up. We evolved,’ Ivy said, with the passion of youth. ‘Our brains are a hundred times bigger than a fox’s. We know enough to recognise cruelty when we see it. Or some of us do. We’re not all Neanderthals anymore, though you look at the way we’re destroying our own planet, you wonder.’

‘It’s obviously something you feel strongly about.’

‘Don’t you?’ Ivy asked.

‘Actually, I do,’ the Queen said, somewhat relieved to have moved from veganism on to safer ground. ‘So does my husband. We have great hope for your generation. You understand the issues better than anyone.’

Ivy tossed her head. ‘That’s what they tell us at school. I hate it when people say that. Like climate change and deforestation and all of it’s our generation’s problem to solve, when we had nothing to do with it. Your generation created the mess; you should be the ones to fix it.’ She glared. ‘Ma’am.’

The Queen didn’t mind the girl’s attitude and was glad there weren’t any eager courtiers around to leap, unnecessarily, to her defence. In fact, she admired Ivy’s spirit, and her unguarded honesty. It was vanishingly rare for her to be challenged in this way by one of her subjects, or indeed anyone other than Philip in a bad mood, or Anne in a very bad one.

‘Did you know Ned St Cyr?’ she asked, not in the spirit of enquiry this time, but out of curiosity. ‘You sound as though you have a lot in common.’

‘Yeah, I did,’ Ivy said. ‘Auntie Judy introduced me. She thought I might like to work on the rewilding thing.’

‘And did you?’

Ivy rolled her eyes with frustration. ‘I was going to, after my exams. It’s like literally the last chance we’ve got to save the planet. The way it’s going, it’s dying. Mr St Cyr was fighting for the future. If he’d carried on, people would’ve been coming from all over the world to see what he was up to.’

‘I’m not sure about that.’

But Ivy’s eyes lit up. ‘Yeah, definitely. It’s incredible how many varieties of birds and butterflies you can get almost overnight on a rewilding project. Species like turtle doves you thought were gone forever . . . they’re suddenly back. And nightingales. If you have wild pigs like Mr St Cyr did . . . maybe not boar, exactly, but Tamworth pigs like he should have used if he wasn’t being such a di—an idiot. The pigs dig up the ground and the new plants that grow provide the seeds the birds need and it’s all there, just waiting.’

The Queen watched the girl’s expression transform as she spoke. The habitual surliness was replaced by shining-eyed conviction and a reasonable mastery of her facts.

‘You describe it quite compellingly,’ she admitted.

Ivy shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter now. Someone else’ll take over. The land will be smothered in pesticides and the poor soil’ll be forced to produce bad food until it’s nothing but dust.’

This was not a thought the Queen wished to linger on. She always liked to find hope if she possibly could.

‘Perhaps you should be a professional rewilder,’ she suggested.

Instantly, the surliness was back. ‘You need land for that . . . ma’am. Like yours.’

‘Landowners need managers and experts to advise them.’

‘Yeah . . . well. I don’t want to be an adviser. I want to make something of my own.’

The Queen looked across at her, head down, striding forward. ‘I don’t doubt you will.’

They were nearly back at the house.

‘Thank you for joining me. That was very interesting,’ the Queen told her.

‘No worries, ma’am,’ Ivy said, with a lopsided grin. ‘Thanks for looking out for my brother. You won’t regret it.’

This ‘ma’am’ had come naturally, the Queen noticed. She felt, if not exactly honoured, then certainly gratified. Ivy was something of a wild creature herself and such gestures had to be earned.

On her way inside, she encountered Philip returning from a visit of his own to friends in the Fens. They paused together in the entrance to the saloon, where the jockey’s weighing scales still stood that had once been used to ensure guests of her great-grandfather were suitably well fed. She told Philip about Ivy’s passionate stance on livestock, because she wanted to see how far he could raise his eyebrows.

‘Pah! Does the girl want us to live on lentils?’

‘I think she does.’

‘And who will grow them? Could she bear for the precious little things to be harvested?’

‘She would manage,’ the Queen said drily.

‘I heard a very funny joke about lentils and chickpeas at Christmas. Gerry Harcourt told me. What’s the difference between a lentil and a chickpea? You wouldn’t pay a hundred pounds to have a lentil—’ He stopped abruptly, mid-flow. ‘Never mind. Actually, I heard about a man in Suffolk who’s going to grow them commercially next year. Interesting crop. I must talk to Charles about it. Mind you, I suppose if Miss Ivy Raspberry had her way, even Sandringham would end up as a wild reserve.’

‘I rather think so.’

‘How will Charles and William support seven hundred people if they can’t work the land, I ask you? Or shoot? God, by the time we get to poor George the place will be nothing but a glamping fest for butterfly fanatics – if he’s lucky.’

Philip spat out the words, but he grew thoughtful. The Queen sensed he would rather love being outdoors, surrounded by butterflies. He certainly had on various trips to the jungle they had enjoyed during their royal tours. It was better than her vision of theme parks and golf courses: a sign of the return to the wild nature of their youth, when the countryside was messy and teeming with life, before all the hedgerows were scrubbed out and fields enlarged to feed the nation, and drenched with the pesticides of which Ivy Raspberry so vehemently disapproved.

‘I’m off. I have work to do,’ he said, shaking off his brief reverie and heading towards his library.

The Queen went upstairs to change. By the time little George was in charge, it would be entirely up to him how to run the estate, of course. One left it in as good order as one could, and hoped for the best. Who would win? she wondered. The farmers who wanted every bit of utility from ever-depleted soil, or the wilders who seemed to think the nation could live on bees and birdsong? She could see that both had the best interests of the land at heart, and one could only hope they would find a way of working it out together. It saddened her, and struck her as somewhat ridiculous, that they were constantly at each other’s throats. They were really so close to each other in what they loved and cared about, if only they knew.

Chapter 20

On Wednesday, the Queen had her first encounter of the new year with the Prime Minister. It was just a phone call at this point; one didn’t ask a busy politician to travel all the way to Norfolk for the afternoon. And one was quite relieved they didn’t want to.

Sir Simon had warned her the conversation might be a difficult one. The PM had been ‘thinking’, apparently. There was certainly a lot to think about. It turned out that the state visit she had proposed to the new president of the USA, which had been mooted in the autumn to happen some time in the spring, was now rising rapidly up the agenda.

‘The president is very keen to show his support for Britain, ma’am. As we are to him.’

‘I see.’

‘He’d like me to be the first foreign leader that he meets after his inauguration. He’s thinking about later this month. We’re working on the details.’ The PM sounded delighted by this, and proud. ‘As we’ve discussed before, I’d like to show our appreciation by offering him a state visit as soon as possible. Perhaps in the summer.’

As they had indeed discussed before, the Queen thought it a dreadful idea.

‘Presidents don’t usually visit until their second year of office at least,’ she reminded her.

‘This will show how important the special relationship is to us, ma’am.’

The relationship was special to the PM, the Queen knew, because she needed a trade deal with America to make up for the ones she would be losing with the European Union.

The Queen did not appreciate a VIP tour of her palaces being trotted out as a bonbon for foreign leaders the country desperately needed to impress. This was partly because the first time she had done it – to the magnificently ungrateful General De Gaulle – it had been an abject failure. She preferred such visits to be a mark of mutual respect. However, it was not her decision. The political atmosphere, both here and across the Atlantic, was fraught at the moment. Perhaps such a visit could help to calm choppy waters. If she could use her hospitality to contribute in any way, of course she would.

It was choppy waters closer to home that preoccupied her more now, anyway. Nearly three weeks had gone by since Ivy Raspberry made her ghastly discovery. After such a promising start, the police seemed to be back where they started. And despite all Rozie’s work and Katie’s help from the village, so did she. Meanwhile, newspaper speculation was rife; the Recorder had published every photograph it could find of royals and St Cyrs together, of which there were many. Often, the pictures were of older generations with shotguns broken over their arms, looking pleased after a game shoot. According to Rozie, who looked (the Queen didn’t), the comments under the online versions of these were not favourable to the monarchy.

More to the point, Ned’s body was still undiscovered. Judy Raspberry was hooked up to various machines in hospital. If Julian Cassidy and Helena Fisher had conspired to achieve this, the Queen couldn’t for the life of her work out why. She refused to believe that it was because of the trampling of a lawn or, however fond she was of dogs, the death of a cockapoo.

According to Ivy, the article Judy was writing – the one that had inspired Mrs Day to wonder if the hit-and-run was organised – turned out to be prompted by a boy on the beach not much older than Ivy herself. Everywhere the Queen looked for dark conspiracies, she found commonplace events. They were sad enough for the individuals concerned, but hardly motive for murder. And certainly not the sort of murder planned as cleverly as this one, where a man had been made to disappear.

Was Ned’s death entirely accidental after all? the Queen wondered. Had he walked out of his flat and fallen into a building site? Was he in the River Thames? Had he chosen to drop out of sight? And yet there was the hand. It always came back to the hand.

The Queen and Rozie had an hour planned in the diary after lunch to go through the next few weeks’ events.

‘Do you have any news?’ she asked, without much hope.

‘A little,’ Rozie said. ‘The police did know rumours of occasional, low-level drug dealing from Snettisham Beach. Even though it’s on your doorstep, ma’am, they simply don’t have the resources to investigate fully or put a stop to it. It’s not that unusual. They’re focused higher up the chain.’

‘I see.’

‘Katie’s talked to her old colleagues at the Border Force. They think the bag on the beach came from a yacht travelling from Holland. They were tracking it at the time and it was heading much further up the coast. It all supports what you said Ivy told you: Judy hadn’t stumbled on something big, just something that really mattered to her.’

‘I’m not sure there’s a difference, but I know what you mean,’ the Queen said.

Rozie consulted her notes.

‘The chief constable did have one update, though, entirely unrelated. Lord Mundy’s son Valentine was seen having lunch with Mr St Cyr in the City of London in November.’

‘Is that a problem? Ned had started to talk to the family again. They told us as much at Christmas. So did Astrid Westover.’

‘It wouldn’t be a problem, except Valentine lied about it. He insisted they hadn’t met since his mother’s funeral, until the police told him they had a sworn witness statement saying he did.’

The Queen sighed. ‘Did he say what they discussed?’

‘No, ma’am. Only that they were catching up on family news. There’s nothing to link him to the disappearance, but his alibi is patchy. His flat in London is only a twenty-minute drive from Mr St Cyr’s flat in Hampstead. He was supposed to be working from home, but he could have gone out and come back again.’

‘What about his sister?’ the Queen asked. She remembered Flora from the Christmas visit as the sibling with the vim. She had been the last person in the family to see him.

Rozie consulted her notes again. ‘I checked the reports for all the family, ma’am. Flora and her father were at Ladybridge Hall all day on the fifteenth.’

‘We know one more thing, ma’am. One of Katie’s knitting friends saw Mr Cassidy at the Feathers pub a few days ago. He’d had a couple of glasses, and he was telling anyone who’d listen that he was the last person to talk to the victim, and that he’d shouted nonsense down the phone.’

‘Oh?’

‘Something about the scuffle, which Mr Cassidy said he’d already apologised for, and the promise that it would rain in hell. People were asking, and he said he had no idea what it was supposed to mean. If he was making it up, it was a strange thing to do. ‘I mentioned it to the chief constable and asked if we should be worried about him. It seemed a reasonable enough question.’

‘I agree.’

‘I didn’t tell him about the car because, as I say, Julian had already reported it. Technically, they know as much as we do.’

‘Exactly,’ the Queen said. ‘If we have something useful to add, we will, but at the moment, we seem to be going around in circles.’

Rozie looked uncomfortable. ‘And unfortunately there’s a problem.’

‘Go on.’

‘Someone in Dersingham seems to have noticed Katie’s interest in Mrs Raspberry’s hit-and-run.’

The Queen pursed her lips. ‘Oh, dear. What happened?’

‘They put a note through her letterbox late last night. It said that she’d been looking in the wrong place.’

‘Ah.’

‘Your name was never mentioned, though, ma’am. Hopefully, they’ll assume she was doing it for her own reasons.’

‘Hmm. Did they give any alternative suggestions?’

‘Well, as a matter of fact they did.’ Rozie took a plain envelope from her notebook. Inside was a handwritten note in a neat pencil script on plain letter paper, enclosing a folded piece of printed paper. The latter was a small article cut out of the East Anglian Chronicle. Rozie handed it to the Queen. It read:

The article went on to remind readers how exceptionally attractive the area was, and how dangerous it was to swim alone, especially in winter when the water was dangerously cold.

The Queen looked up at Rozie.

‘Do we know anything about the swimmer?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Rozie said. ‘He came from a village south of here, called Vickery.’

‘That’s on the Ladybridge Estate.’

Rozie nodded. ‘The thing is, Katie’s a wild swimmer, too. She says that if you’re very experienced, as he was, you know not to go out alone in freezing water, and not to stay out too long. She’s not convinced it was an accident, and she doesn’t think the person who gave her the article does, either.’

The Queen felt very bleak. New Year’s Eve had been so full of happiness and hope at Sandringham, as they danced into the small hours. The following morning had been marred by Jack Lions’s interview, but that had been an annoyance, really, nothing more. To think that, only a few miles away, a man’s life was ending in such a tragic way.

There was a pause while she called Willow to her and stroked under the corgi’s warm ears. That was the day she had found out about Judy Raspberry. She had been convinced that the hit-and-run was part of a bigger picture. Someone was covering their tracks. Yet wherever she looked for conspiracies she found coincidences. She had been too sure of herself. Even after ninety years, she needed to learn humility sometimes.

But the suspicious death of someone connected to the St Cyr family seat? That didn’t smack of coincidence at all. Her moment of humility passed. She patted the dog and looked at Rozie.

‘Has Katie arranged to talk to . . .’ she consulted the article once more ‘. . . The Dix Dunkers?’

Rozie nodded. ‘She’s meeting one of them tomorrow, ma’am.’