Murder Most Royal

Chapter 21

The little village of Vickery, much like West Newton, consisted of neat cottages lined up along well-tended roads. It looked as if it had just been swept and clipped, ready to star in the sort of Christmas movie where the heroine, home for the holidays, discovers the sexy wickedness of Hugh Grant and chooses – inexplicably – to settle down with someone safe at the end of the third reel. Rozie used to watch those kind of movies with her sister when they were both tired from studying, curled up on the duvet side by side, waiting for their mother to shout at them to turn off the light. She had always dismissed the settings as unreal, but now she knew that wasn’t true: they existed, when wealthy landlords wanted them to.

It was Rozie, not Katie, who was visiting the organiser of the Dix Dunkers. Katie had called to say she’d had a bad night and could barely make it down the stairs. By coincidence, it was Rozie’s morning off. She had put aside the run and the personal grooming session she had planned for herself. And here she was.

Mary Collathorn lived in ‘the cottage with the two weeping pears in the front garden’, as she’d explained to Rozie. ‘You can’t miss it.’ The twin domes outside the fourth building she passed looked exactly like the ones she had looked up on Google Images. She parked her Mini outside.

‘So you’re thinking of taking up wild swimming?’

‘Mmmm.’ Rozie sipped her expertly made cappuccino. It pained Rozie slightly to repay Mary’s hospitality with a series of lies, but they were in a good cause. Nothing, if truth were told, would inveigle her into freezing cold water voluntarily. She wasn’t crazy. But for the purposes of the visit, she had been recommended to the group by someone in Dersingham who had heard great things about them. She made some noises about wanting to swim in a river, rather than the sea, as that’s what they seemed to do most of the time. ‘I’m sorry about your recent loss, by the way,’ she added. ‘I read about Mr Wallace.’

‘Oh, it was terrible, what happened to him,’ Mary said. ‘We’re all reeling. He was such a fixture on the Ladybridge Estate.’

‘Was he? Was he connected to the family in some way? The St Cyrs, I mean.’

‘Oh! Do you know them?’ Mary asked.

‘I met some of them at Sandringham,’ Rozie said. She usually kept very quiet about her encounters behind closed doors, but today, gossip seemed very much in order. ‘Did Chris work for them?’

‘Most people do, round here,’ Mary said. ‘Chris was a second-generation tenant, like me. His father was the mechanic for Patrick St Cyr in the early sixties. It was all very glamorous back then.’

Rozie noticed the way Mary expected her to know who everyone in the family was, and why working for someone called Patrick should be glamorous. It was a bit like Sir Simon and Debrett’s again.

‘Remind me about Patrick?’ Rozie said.

‘He was the heir at the time – the tenth baron’s son. He threw the most famous parties in East Anglia. But really, he wanted to be a racing driver. My mother remembers him dashing round the lanes in a series of blue sports cars. He used to talk about setting up his own racing team one day. Mr Wallace – senior, that is – was always working on something for him, and if he wasn’t busy on the cars, there were the tractors. He made clocks, too, I remember. After the accident, he was worried he’d lose his job, but the family in those days were very loyal.’

‘The accident?’

‘Oh, it was awful. Patrick was racing home through the Fens in his sports car after a storm. When I say racing, they think he was doing nearly a hundred miles an hour. He hit a patch of flooding, and he didn’t stand a chance. I saw the pictures of the car, upside down in a dyke. It was such a tragedy. His mother, the baroness, was a fragile woman. Her hair went white overnight, like Marie Antoinette’s. She made Chris’s father burn the car and dismantle the chassis and melt it down and bury what was left. She died the following year. His father hadn’t been fully well since the war; he went two years later. And now there was no male heir, of course, so the title went to a different branch of the family. But you don’t want to talk about them – you want to talk about swimming. You’ll love it, I promise you.’

For a good ten minutes, Rozie discussed the benefits of immersing the human body in very cold water. Having tried it in the army during various exercises, she still maintained that it was a terrible idea unless absolutely necessary for the security of the nation, but she practised looking fascinated. Afterwards, it wasn’t hard to veer the conversation back towards the subject of Chris, who had been such a passionate convert to wild swimming. As Katie suspected, he knew all the rules of swimming in very cold water. He simply would not have gone out alone, and stayed out for so long, by accident.

‘You don’t think . . .? I mean, there’s no reason to suppose he wasn’t alone, is there?’ Rozie said.

Mary’s eyes widened. ‘D’you mean, did someone make him do it? Oh, goodness! What a horror! No! People aren’t speculating about that in Dersingham, are they?’

‘One or two were wondering . . .’ Rozie said, feeling hugely disloyal to A Load of Balls and the Sweary Stitchers, even though she wasn’t a member.

Mary looked militant. ‘Well, you can put their minds at ease, if you can call it that. I know why he went out that day. He absolutely intended to do what he did. It was simply awful.’

Rozie said nothing. Sometimes silence and an interested expression was enough.

‘He was recently widowed, you know. Laura, his wife, was the shepherdess for the farm. They’d lived in that cottage forty years. She died in the bedroom, with him beside her. The kids were born there. Laura poured her heart and soul into the place. She was diagnosed with cancer at about the same time as the baroness. The last one, I mean – Lee. They nursed each other through it. You’d think the family would have some decency. But after the baroness died . . .’

‘What happened?’

Mary shook her head. ‘Chris said they’d told him the cottage was wanted for a bloody Airbnb. They were giving him three months to get out. He had nowhere else to go, no idea what to do. I drank a dram of whisky with him on New Year’s Eve and I could see how overwrought he was.’

‘So you think he went into the sea like that deliberately?’

‘Oh, I’m sure of it. I made a promise to myself that I’d go over after lunch on New Year’s Day and check he was OK. But by then it was already much too late. He’d left his wallet in a bag on the beach. I was his emergency contact, so they called me.’ Tears spilled silently down her cheeks. ‘And I was just here, making soup.’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Rozie said gently.

Mary gazed at her fiercely through the tears. ‘Of course it wasn’t! I know exactly whose fault it was.’

Chapter 22

The Sunday morning service at St Mary’s in Flitcham went very well. There was a bit of a to-do beforehand when the Queen’s protection team discovered a packet of drugs hidden under one of the kneelers. But the incident was over and done with before the Queen arrived.

On Monday, the outgoing US ambassador made his formal goodbye to the Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps, representing Her Majesty at Buckingham Palace. She had written the man a warm personal note for him to pass on. The ambassador had been very fond of London, and London was very fond of him. His departure marked the end of an era. The PM’s formal announcement of the UK’s exit from the Single Market marked another one. They were only halfway through January and what a year of change this was already turning out to be.

The annual visit to the West Newton branch of the WI on Thursday came at just the right time. Such cyclical events, like the church calendar, conferred a comforting rhythm on life which was very much needed. The Queen wasn’t the only woman to feel it. Everyone seemed grateful to be there.

Of course, the talk was largely about Judy Raspberry, the much-missed treasurer. She was sitting up in bed in her ward at the Queen Elizabeth, already itching to be home, but she still couldn’t remember anything about her accident. She had heard that Her Majesty herself had asked after her health, and was very touched.

Sir Simon went up to London to try and placate a disgruntled group of Scottish MPs. There were rumblings that when the UK exited the Single Market, the Scots would want to rerun their independence referendum. Ultimately, it would be up to the Scots themselves to decide, but the Queen was keen on the ‘united’ part of the United Kingdom. She would prefer it, to put it mildly, to stay that way.

The circumstances were not ideal, but it made it easier for the Queen and Rozie to catch up without Rozie having to lie to the private secretary about what they had discussed. And since Rozie had described her visit to Vickery, there was a lot to talk about.

‘Katie managed to see Mrs Raspberry in hospital, ma’am,’ Rozie said. ‘She doesn’t know any of the St Cyr family apart from Ned. She also doesn’t know Mr Wallace. It’s hard to see a connection between them.’

The Queen had learned her lesson. ‘Then let’s not try and make one.’

‘There was one piece of good news. Katie worked out who gave her the newspaper article about Mr Wallace. It was a member of her own wild swimming group. They’d somehow found out about her Home Office background and thought she was interested in suspicious accidents because of that. They didn’t connect it to Ned, or me, or you.’

‘That’s very reassuring,’ the Queen agreed. Katie was eager to help, but she didn’t have Rozie’s lightness of touch when required. The Queen wasn’t sure Rozie yet realised how good, and how very dependable, she was. ‘What about Valentine St Cyr? Is there any news?’

‘Yes, ma’am. The police are interested in the fact that Roland Peng’s initials are RLP.’

‘Roland Peng, his business partner?’

‘In part, ma’am. I’ll come to that. It turns out that Valentine had more than one meeting with Ned last year. Interestingly, they hadn’t spotted them before because Ned put them in his diary as “VSC”. Usually he wrote names in full and locations as acronyms. But if VSC was a name, then perhaps RIP was one, too. And perhaps he miswrote it or it was just a feature of his handwriting, but he could have meant RLP. That’s what they’re looking into now.’

‘So Ned might have arranged to meet Roland?’

‘Apparently. Roland claims to have been in business meetings both days, but there were gaps between them. He was, supposedly, with Valentine the night of the fourteenth. They are each other’s alibi.’

‘Are they?’

‘Yes, ma’am. That’s the thing. Flora told me on New Year’s Eve that they’re secretly engaged. She swore me to secrecy, too, but she was obviously very happy for them.’

‘Valentine and Roland?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Engaged?’

‘Yes. Roland proposed at Christmas.’ Rozie smiled. The Queen thought she looked very pleased about it.

‘When are they announcing it, do you know?’

Rozie noticed that the Queen was truly startled. She found the Boss generally much more open-minded than most people would suspect, but not this time. Her generation’s prejudices showed through. Rozie was disappointed.

‘In the summer. Flora said something about them getting used to the idea. It could be something to do with Roland’s family in Singapore. The baron’s been told. He took it pretty well, she said. For someone of his . . . You know, ma’am. His generation.’

‘I wonder when they planned on telling me,’ the Queen said, more to herself than anything. ‘Do many other people know this “secret”?’

‘The police don’t. It’s not in any of the reports. I thought they looked very happy together at the visit. I wasn’t completely surprised when Flora told me.’

‘Weren’t you?’ the Queen said, peering at Rozie through her bifocals. ‘I admit, I am. And do the police have any reason to think that Roland would have wanted to kill his partner’s distant cousin? He didn’t park in a specific place, for example?’

‘No, ma’am. It’s just the initials at this stage. But they have a team working on it.’

‘I’m sure they do,’ the Queen agreed. ‘They throw technology at problems. Think of all those phone records and traffic cameras. I’m a great believer in technology. But they haven’t made the connection with Chris Wallace yet.’ She was silent for a while, before adding, ‘You’ll like Ladybridge.’

‘Ma’am?’

‘I have a standing invitation. Call Lord Mundy and let him know I’d be delighted to come to lunch before I go back to London. The sooner the better. You know when the gaps in my diary are.’

After Rozie left, the Queen thought back to Valentine St Cyr and Roland Peng. They would be making history in ways that Rozie clearly didn’t understand. Did their secret have something to do with what had happened to Chris Wallace? She found herself thinking about it again later, when her racing manager was helping her put the finishing touches to the jigsaw in the saloon. They completed the Constable, which was a huge satisfaction. Human puzzles, as always, were much more challenging.

Chapter 23

The turning to Ladybridge was familiar from the Queen’s childhood, when she and her sister had visited with their mother. The road took them through the village of Vickery and past the long, flint-lined walls of the estate to the Ladybridge village green with its pub and the little church of St Agnes, where Georgina St Cyr was now buried in the family vault.

Today, the Queen was travelling with Lady Caroline, while Rozie and her protection officer followed behind. The Range Rovers rounded a corner near the church and drove through a wide stone archway towards the hall itself, which was tightly surrounded by its famous moat and set among orchards and meadows leading down to a little river, with fields and farmland beyond.

The picturesque view was the happy result of failure, rather than success. The St Cyrs, as any of them would tell you, had generally been on the wrong side of history: Catholic in Elizabethan times, Royalist during the Civil War, firmly agricultural during the Industrial Revolution. They had been well respected, but never rich. Poor decisions, death duties and bad luck had chipped away at the income from their land and caused the hall itself to fall into deep disrepair at times during its five centuries of existence. But this had worked in the house’s favour in the end. Limited in space by the moat that surrounded them, the motley collection of medieval and Elizabethan buildings hadn’t been expanded, rebuilt or restyled by succeeding generations. Over the centuries their twisted chimneys, steep, sloping roofs and gothic crenellations had passed from unfashionable to out of date, to almost ruined, but the Tudor details of its weathered brick design had stayed intact. The last four generations had fought hard to preserve what they had, so that now the guidebooks to the county praised it as ‘untouched’, ‘unspoilt’, ‘a harmonious example of Elizabethan moated architecture at its finest’. Glimpsed from a distance through Norfolk mist, it could easily be an illustration from a fairy tale.

Ladybridge was, the Queen had always thought, the perfect size for a child to grow up in – a bit like Birkhall in Scotland, where her mother had spent a happy childhood. It was not so large that you would feel endlessly intimidated by it, but big enough for hide-and-seek, for endless indoor games on rainy days and larks outside on sunny ones. Each brick and stone told the story of the generations who had lived there. The grounds beyond were ripe for childish adventures. No wonder Georgina had wanted Ned to grow up here, and what a lucky little boy he had been.

The last stretch of road had once been through a cherry orchard, which the Queen Mother had always tried to visit in spring for the joy of its endless pale pink. But now, she saw, half of it was set aside as a visitor car park. A modern carbuncle on the orchard gateway turned out to be a ticket booth advertising tours of the gardens ‘Open from 1 April’. Some of the romance had been sacrificed to make what was left accessible. The Queen nodded to herself. It was a sign of survival.

The car swept across the drawbridge and into the cobbled courtyard of the main house, where three generations of St Cyrs had come out to greet them, accompanied by an assortment of spaniels, terriers and an elderly Labrador.

The baron looked as old and hunched as he had been at Christmas. He had not dressed up for her visit. Hugh’s normal style, which bordered on affectation, was a patched tweed jacket, a flannel shirt and cord trousers held up with baling twine. The Queen suspected he had seen himself as a rural character from a P. G. Wodehouse novel at some point in his more sprightly middle age, and stuck with it. Several other Norfolk landowners she knew were of similar mind, but the baling twine edged it, in her opinion.

Flora stood beside him, along with her three pretty, teenage daughters, who had not accompanied their mother to Sandringham. Their father, like Ned’s, was no longer in the picture. Somehow, men who were not St Cyrs by blood didn’t survive Ladybridge very long. Flora wore a neat jumper over a thick skirt that suggested the heating at the hall was not up to the quality of its gardens. It was impossible to tell whether the girls had made an effort. All their clothes were ripped or half-missing or very old and creased. It might be the first thing they’d pulled out of the wardrobe, but the Queen sensed it might equally be the height of fashion for their age.

‘Dad’s laid on lunch,’ Flora said, ‘but afterwards I want to show you the gardens. I know how much your mother loved them.’

Lunch was held in the panelled dining room whose windows overlooked the moat, where four white swans floated serenely by. It wasn’t quite as nice as the dining room at Sandringham, the Queen thought, but not far off. Conversation over coffee in the adjacent drawing room inevitably turned to Ned.

‘What sort of mood was he in when you saw him?’ Lady Caroline asked. ‘Did you have any sense he was in trouble?’

The Queen was really very grateful for Lady Caroline.

‘I thought he seemed rather grim,’ Hugh said. ‘But perhaps that’s because he knew he’d be asking me for money over coffee.’

Flora disagreed. ‘He was in full flow, most of the time. He was happy to lecture us on how to run the place, which seemed to amount to not running it. He wanted us to let Mundy Forest run wild, and he wanted Ladybridge to be an “inland wetland centre”, whatever that is. I pointed out it’s pretty wet already, what with the moat and the river. He wasn’t remotely interested in what we’re actually doing.’ She sighed. ‘I had hoped he’d come with Astrid, and we did ask if she might be around, but of course she was away in Spain. She’s very good on social media. I wanted to ask her advice about Instagram. Ladybridge is so photogenic.’

‘So you know her?’ the Queen asked.

‘I was at Pony Club with her eldest sister. I thought she was crazy to be marrying a man twice her age, until I saw them together at Abbottswood. I think it would have worked, actually.’

‘I know what you mean,’ the Queen agreed. ‘Not that I did see them together, exactly.’

‘The wedding would’ve been in three weeks,’ Eden, the youngest girl, piped up morosely.

‘Oh, dear. I suppose so,’ Lady Caroline agreed.

‘Ned invited us. He said now the family were back together, it was kind of important. I had this incredible Burberry dress I was going to wear . . .’

‘Figgy!’ her eldest sister Emerald said warningly.

‘What? It was a really nice dress.’

Emerald went puce. The Queen sensed a certain tension between the siblings that wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. Eden was a successful model at sixteen and a bit of a wild child. Her picture had been on the cover of a recent Harper’s Bazaar, dressed in a scrap of green silk that left little to the imagination. Sophie Wessex had shown it to her. The Queen thought the girl looked too thin in the picture, but had refrained from saying so, because her grandmother had said the same thing about the debs after the war, and it made one sound old. Today, her chosen outfit was a slightly stained vintage coat with frogging, that looked as if it might have once belonged to a slender Cossack officer. It covered her from neck to ankle and, despite the staining, she looked very good in it.

‘This was the exact last place we saw him,’ Emerald said. ‘In this room. He sat right where you’re sitting now, ma’am.’

‘Goodness,’ the Queen said. ‘How alarming. It must have been very awkward for you when the police came, asking questions.’

‘They were here for ages,’ Eden said. ‘They wanted to see all the weapons in the armoury passage. They asked loads of questions. By the end I was starting to think I’d done it myself.’

‘They wanted to know about our alibis the next day,’ Elinor, the middle girl, explained. ‘I didn’t really have one. I was out on a hack on Skylark most of the day. I’m sure I’d have had time to dash up to London by train and do something terrible.’

‘No, you wouldn’t,’ Emerald said, with a curled lip. ‘That train takes forever. You couldn’t even have driven it.’

‘I could.’

‘You can’t get out of second gear.’

‘I could if I had an automatic,’ Elinor grumbled. She appealed to the Queen. ‘They only let me drive the 2CV, which is literally fifty years old and squeaks if you go over twenty miles an hour. And it’s broken right now. But I bet if I had a sports car I could have—’

‘Elinor did not kill our cousin,’ Flora assured the Queen briskly. ‘She hardly knew the man.’

‘And what about the rest of you?’ the Queen asked, with a hint of a smile to suggest she was joking, which she wasn’t.

‘Eden had a shoot in London,’ Emerald said promptly. The Queen pictured tweeds and shotguns and was surprised at the location, but quickly realised Emerald meant magazines. ‘I drove her up after the lunch, because she’s still a child. Yes, you are, Figgy, so shut up. I suppose we could have done something to him in town, but we were with the magazine people all day next day. Those things go on for absolutely hours. We weren’t home until teatime.’

‘I still wasn’t back from my ride,’ Elinor said sullenly. Nobody seemed interested.

‘I don’t remember where I was,’ Lord Mundy said.

‘Yes, you do, Dad,’ Flora reminded him. ‘You went for tea with Mrs Capelton.’

‘No, that was the day before. Ned dropped me off after lunch. She’s in charge of making the new kneelers for St Agnes in memory of Lee. She’s a wonderful woman but it took me two and a half hours to get away. I had to walk home in the dark.’

‘Who visited you that night, Grandpa?’ Elinor asked. ‘I saw the taxi in the courtyard.’

‘That I do remember. It was poor Mr Wallace. He was in a very fragile state. I tried to reassure him, but I’m not sure how effective I was.’

‘He did look grim,’ Flora agreed. ‘And then you and I had a marathon session on the church refurbishment accounts with the vicar the next day.’

‘Oh, yes. And an antiquarian bookseller came in the afternoon. He’s interested in some of my first editions. It’s a wrench to say goodbye to them, but Flora needs her cake shop.’

‘I went for a ride,’ Flora said. ‘I’d have tried to meet up with Elinor if I’d known I was going to be quizzed about it for hours by a policeman, but sadly, I didn’t. I do have a fitness tracker, though. He seemed to think that might help.’

By now the girls were getting restless and dispersed to various parts of the house. Flora invited the Queen to see the gardens, but the baron said he had something to discuss with Her Majesty, which suited her admirably. Rozie, who had agreed on the division of labour beforehand, offered to go with Flora instead.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know one end of a trowel from the other,’ Rozie admitted, as they put on coats and wellies in the boot room of the hall. ‘But I like those bushes you cut into shapes.’

‘Topiary?’ Flora asked. ‘Sorry, we don’t have much of that. It tends to be in formal gardens. Apart from the maze, ours are very . . . You’ll see.’

They trudged over the drawbridge and round the gravel path that skirted the outside of the moat and led down a bank, towards a meadow fringed with willows. Rozie soon saw why Flora had insisted on wellingtons for them both: the ground was soggy and they disappeared in it up to their ankles.

‘Do you do a lot of work on the estate?’ Rozie asked.

Flora nodded. ‘Oh, yes. It keeps me busy and we can’t afford nearly enough professionals to do it all. There are the gardens and the new visitor plans. Dad manages the agricultural side of the farm, but I love the sheep. We lost our shepherdess last year. I can’t do everything with them yet, but it turns out I have a knack for it.’

Rozie could see some of the sheep Flora was referring to in a distant field, beyond the line of willows. Black and white, they dotted the landscape like something out of one of those jigsaws the Queen liked to do.

They were approaching a series of ponds linked by a stream that fed into the river. She explained that it was a nineteenth-century water garden that her mother had revived. They stood on a little wooden humpback bridge and looked into the fast-flowing stream.

‘I heard you had a bit of a tragedy recently,’ Rozie said.

‘Golly, which one?’ Flora asked.

‘A man called Chris Wallace.’

‘Oh, him. Yes, that was absolutely shocking. How did you know?’

‘It’s all around Dersingham, I’m afraid.’

Flora tutted. ‘Lord, the local gossips. He was devastated about his wife. Like Dad, really. I suppose that’s why he went to see him.’

‘I heard he’d been asked to move out.’

Flora turned to look sharply at Rozie. ‘Goodness, no. Laura Wallace was one of Mum’s best friends. Her children were like brothers and sisters to us when we were little. Whatever gave people that idea?’

‘Sorry, Dersingham’s a hotbed of gossip, as you say,’ Rozie backtracked, shaking her head and grinning in a placatory way. ‘The crochet group is bad, but the embroiderers . . . you have no idea.’

It seemed to work. Flora warmed up again. She showed Rozie the white gardens enclosed among lichen-covered walls and low-cut hedges, for which Georgina St Cyr had become famous. As a non-gardener, Rozie had to take Flora’s word for it that the bare bushes and half-empty beds would look spectacular in spring and summer when they were full of white roses, lilies and fat hydrangeas.

‘There are all sorts of rare plants here,’ Flora explained. ‘All my female ancestors were collectors. I fully intend to be one, too, when we can afford it. Thanks to my mother and Georgina, it was the gardens that kept Ladybridge going, not the farm. We have one of the best collections of lilies in the country, to go with the water lilies on the ponds. Mummy was passionate about water lilies. She was a real water baby. And we did have an exceptional poison garden, but I’m having to get rid of it because you try getting public liability insurance when your deadly nightshade collection rivals your hemlock and wolfsbane. It pains me to do it, because Georgina started that collection in the 1930s and my mother had an odd gothic streak to her, and she loved it, too. However—’ she shrugged ‘—dead visitors are bad for business.’

Rozie stole another glance at her as they walked along the gravel path between box-edged flower beds. The dry humour of the aristocracy still caught her by surprise.

‘Has anyone died? Of poison, I mean?’ Rozie asked.

‘Not that I know of,’ Flora said breezily. ‘Not recently, anyway. Legend has it that one of the servants was poisoned with hemlock back in Georgian times. His ghost is supposed to haunt the Long Gallery, but I’ve never seen it. My brother nearly died when he was six or seven. I think it was wolfsbane he ate. Dad was beside himself. He wanted all the wolfsbane dug up. My mother was pretty tough about it. She said he’d learned his lesson. Val didn’t touch it again. Anyway, it’s all gone now.’

They rounded a couple of large greenhouses and the twisted chimneys of the hall came back into view to their left, with the gatehouse further away to the right. Flora stopped and pointed.

‘There,’ she said, as if Rozie had asked her a question.

‘I’m sorry?’

Flora was very still and thoughtful.

‘That’s where I saw Ned for the last time, driving away with Dad in his ridiculous pink Land Rover. He called it the Pink Panther, you know. It was painted to match his house. He waved his trilby at me.’ She imitated the movement with her right hand. ‘I honestly thought the next time I’d see him would be at his wedding.’ She hesitated. ‘Can I tell you an awful secret?’

‘Go on.’

Flora smiled slightly. ‘It’s such a relief not to be hated. He pretended he didn’t, but he’d resented us for so long. I used to feel his presence like an angry ghost. And now he actually is dead, the spirit has lifted. And I feel my mother’s presence instead. Isn’t that utterly bizarre?’

Rozie glanced across at the ancient bricks and stones of the hall, sitting serenely above the moat that mirrored the sky.

‘I can imagine this place would encourage you to think that way.’

‘It is ridiculous. That’s what you’re thinking. I’m a romantic idiot.’

Rozie had in fact been wondering if Flora – practical, competent, sharp-thinking Flora – was putting on an act. If so, it was a neat double bluff. She certainly felt as if she had been more of an audience than a confidante.

‘I don’t think you’re an idiot at all,’ she said, and wondered how the Queen was getting on.

The Queen was letting Lady Caroline do most of the talking again.

‘Do you know? I haven’t been here since I was eighteen. I was here with Lee. It must have been before you got married. Do you mind if we have a quick look in the Long Gallery? I remember thinking it was one of my favourite rooms in Norfolk.’

They walked down a long, panelled corridor from the hall’s east wing, where the family’s living accommodation was, past a series of large tapestries featuring knights and ladies in a mythical green landscape with a river running through it, whose banks were dotted with spring flowers.

‘Were these here before?’ the Queen asked.

‘Yes,’ Hugh said, ‘but I had them cleaned last year, for Lee. Arthur and Guinevere. Lee always loved those landscapes. She said they reminded her of her gardens. Water and flowers and so on. I had them hung in her suite when she was bed-bound. They gave her a lot of pleasure in her final weeks.’

His grief was so different from Astrid Westover’s, the Queen thought. He held it in, and held on to it. It was etched onto his face.

He guided them to the Long Gallery on the second floor of the south wing, where Elizabethans would have taken their exercise in bad weather. It was a bright, sunny space with a plaster ceiling, longer than a tennis court and lined with the family portraits Georgina St Cyr had moved to make way for her modern art collection downstairs. They stood and looked out through mullioned windows over the meadow and the riverbank beyond.

‘I remember Ned bringing me up here,’ Lady Caroline said. ‘This was where the ghostly servant walks, isn’t it? Ned tried to scare me about it. Failed miserably. I love ghosts. We rode bicycles around here like mad things. It was tremendous fun. Lee was there, too, I remember. Ned was very soppy about her. It was before you were married. Didn’t he go out with her, too?’

Hugh looked acutely uncomfortable. ‘They knew each other,’ he acknowledged gruffly. ‘Ned met her at the Agricultural College, but I knew her brother from Oxford. Once we met, we decided on marriage very quickly. I never regretted it for a day.’

How Ned must have hated you, the Queen thought. Getting the estate and the girl. She could almost feel the resentment sunk into the sloping floor. Not a ghost, exactly, but a malignant presence. Ned’s stubborn fury made more sense now. If he had decided to kill his cousin, half a century ago, she could almost have understood. His fury had persisted for decades, but according to his fiancée he had finally moved beyond it. Was she right? Had she been telling the truth? Anyway, now the fate of Ladybridge was in Hugh’s hands.

‘You mentioned at Christmas,’ she said, ‘that Flora is inheriting, not Valentine.’

‘Ah, yes, ma’am.’ Hugh looked uncomfortable. ‘I should have discussed it with you first. I intended to but I was somewhat distracted . . .’

‘Does Valentine mind?’ Lady Caroline asked.

‘He’ll get the title, of course. He’s good with tenancies and financing and so on, but he’s embraced city life. He doesn’t want to while away his days in East Anglia worrying about milk yields and badgers and foot and mouth.’

‘Most sons come round eventually.’

‘Only because they have to. My father didn’t want to take over Ladybridge, you know. He’d been very happy at his law firm in Ipswich. Suddenly he was lumbered with death duties and black beetle and dry rot. It would have been easier for him if Georgina had inherited from her father, but . . . male primogeniture and all that rot.’

He turned to the Queen and laughed slightly. She murmured her agreement, to an extent, although she wouldn’t have gone quite as far as ‘rot’. Nevertheless, she and Philip had ended the system in their own family, and not only for property but for titles, too. Little Charlotte Cambridge now held her place in the succession ahead of any younger brothers she might have.

‘Valentine has other plans,’ Hugh added. ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. He and Roland are getting married. I wanted you to be among the first to know.’

‘Oh, are they?’ the Queen said, disingenuously – as if Rozie had never mentioned it. ‘My congratulations, obviously. It will be a first.’

‘The first man in the peerage to marry another man, you mean? Indeed. The St Cyrs are leading the way, ma’am. Another family entry in the history books.’

‘It certainly will be.’ The Queen was aware that her surprise at this decision made her sound stiff. It was true about the history books.

‘He and Roland are planning to live in New York.’

‘How lovely,’ Lady Caroline said firmly. ‘And thank goodness you have Flora to look after things here.’

‘Exactly,’ Hugh agreed.

They walked down a wide staircase of shallow steps and through a vaulted hallway decorated with intricate patterns of crossed swords, pikes and halberds, pistols and muskets dating back to the Civil War. Outside, in a second inner courtyard near the medieval section of the house, a wheelbarrow and two large piles of stone, wrapped in plastic, suggested the new building works were not complete.

‘Is there still much to do?’ Lady Caaroline asked.

‘A little,’ Hugh conceded. ‘We’re damp-proofing the rooms where Flora’s new cake shop will go. Quite an undertaking with a moat, as you can imagine.’

As they stood in the courtyard, the sun, which had been hidden by a bank of cloud all day, suddenly fought its way through and bathed them in its pale gold, wintery light.

Lady Caroline beamed. ‘There’s nothing like a winter’s afternoon when the sun finally makes an appearance.’

Hugh offered to take them on a quick tour round the moat. The clouds were rolling back rapidly now to reveal an ever-increasing patch of pale blue sky. A light breeze ruffled the grasses in the distant meadows.

‘This sceptred isle, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden,’ Hugh murmured. He gave a brief, self-deprecatory laugh. ‘Or so I’ve always thought.’

‘Richard II!’ Lady Caroline announced happily. ‘We studied it at school. It’s John of Gaunt, isn’t it? This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England . . . I always loved that speech. It doesn’t end well, though.’ She shook her head and laughed, too.

They rounded the eastern side of the house and turned to the south, where the moat was bordered by a formal rose garden before a lengthy slope led down to the tree-fringed river below. There was an eerie peacefulness to the scene, pierced occasionally by stern calling and counter-calling from sheep in a distant field.

‘Oh, you have sheep, too!’ Lady Caroline said to Hugh. Her thoughts were on a very different track from the Queen’s, and much sunnier. ‘You are brave. My brother keeps them and he can’t make a penny out of them. He does it for the love.’

‘So do we,’ Hugh agreed. ‘These are Norfolk Horns. They used to be practically extinct. The fleeces are wonderful quality, but worth nothing in these days of synthetic clothes, of course. They make excellent meat, too. We were devastated to lose our poor, dear shepherdess last year.’

‘Do you have much to do with the tenants?’ the Queen asked.

‘Socially, d’you mean? Oh, goodness, it varies. We entertain them a few times a year,’ Hugh said. ‘It was always more Lee’s domain than mine. “Hearts and minds”, she called it. Like the army, you know. Oh, look, up there.’ He pointed across the meadow, above the river, where a heron was gliding silently on outstretched wings. ‘Some are friends and some are absolute bastards.’

‘Herons?’ she asked.

‘No, tenants. I’m sure you find the same thing. They all loved Lee, though,’ he added softly. ‘And I’m sure they’ll come round to Flora, too. She only wants the best for Ladybridge.’

They kept walking around the moat until they were level with the buildings at the other end of the hall from the drawbridge, where the works on Flora’s future cake shop were evident from missing window frames and loose tarpaulins at ground level, one of which flapped forlornly in the breeze.

‘It’s like the Forth Bridge,’ Hugh commented. ‘Never finished.’

‘And yet always itself,’ Lady Caroline said. ‘I’m sure St Cyrs have been thinking it wasn’t quite done from the moment they moved in, don’t you?’

Hugh grinned. ‘You’re probably right.’

As they rounded the next corner they heard a shout and saw Flora waving to them from the far end of the path, next to Rozie. Even from a distance, the Queen thought she detected a set to Rozie’s shoulders that meant her APS had something to tell her. Good. Meanwhile, her own thoughts were developing rapidly. They had a lot to talk about.

Chapter 24

Back in the saloon, the family were clustered in front of the television set, watching the inauguration of the forty-fifth president. He was seventy, as commentators felt it necessary to mention – the same age as Ned, yet obviously with much life ahead of him and much to do. Not all of it popular, if the protests taking place around the world and the lack of famous faces in the crowd were anything to go by. But the Queen was taken with Senator Blunt’s opening remarks about the ‘commonplace and miraculous’ tradition of a peaceful transfer of power.

People rather took that for granted these days, she thought. As a keen student of history, she was highly aware that transfers of power could be bloody and dangerous. Her namesake had lived in constant fear of it in the sixteenth century. Her distant cousin, Nicholas II, had lost his whole family to a revolution. The War of Independence, Partition . . . the list was brutal and long, and close to home. Philip’s family in Greece had had to run for their lives. The ‘commonplace miracle’ of peaceful transfer was much to be treasured. If her own entry in the history books could say only one thing, it would be this: for three-score years and ten, as far as she could manage it, transfers of power to countries in her beloved Commonwealth had happened peacefully. They had not always been happy, or to governments one thoroughly approved of, but you could not have everything.

The Queen wasn’t alone with Rozie for the rest of the day. Sir Simon was supposed to be bringing in the boxes the following morning, but she was relieved to see that Rozie arranged to do it herself. Rozie still had that set to her shoulders.

‘Did you learn anything useful?’ the Queen asked, without even making a pretence at opening the first box.

‘I think so,’ Rozie said. She explained how cold and evasive Flora had seemed about Chris Wallace. ‘She said his wife was close to the baroness, and that their children grew up together. But nothing about him being turfed out. She absolutely denied it. Then she seemed to get distracted by the poison garden.’

‘Is that still there?’

‘Well, no. Flora said she had to get rid of it because of the visitors. I can see why. Her brother nearly died of wolfsbane poisoning when he was little, apparently.’

‘Oh, dear.’

‘The baron wanted it all dug up in a fury, even though his wife was fond of the garden.’

The Queen was surprised. ‘How unlike Hugh.’ She thought a bit longer. ‘How very unlike Hugh. How interesting.’

‘How did you get on, ma’am?’ Rozie ventured.

The Queen pursed her lips, picked up the fountain pen on her desk and fiddled with the lid.

‘I was reminded of just how strong Ned’s childhood feelings for Ladybridge must have been. On top of that, Hugh ended up marrying Ned’s girl. If it had been Ned who had killed his cousin all those years ago, it would have made sense.’

‘Lord Mundy drove away with Ned. They could have argued in the car,’ Rozie suggested, thinking it up as she went along. ‘And then . . . Could the baron have followed him to London?’

‘Only if a tenant, Flora, the vicar and an antiquarian bookseller were lying.’

‘It’s a very solid alibi.’ Rozie grinned. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, I’m making up wild stories about people you know.’

‘No, no. It’s useful to think through the possibilities. However, Hugh and his son are not on good terms from what I see and hear, despite what Hugh would like me to believe.’

‘He was distraught when Valentine ate the wolfsbane as a child,’ Rozie pointed out.

‘Yes,’ the Queen agreed. ‘But that was a very long time ago.’

‘But Lord Mundy’s been very supportive of his son. With the whole gay marriage thing. I mean, that’s really something.’

The Queen noticed how Rozie was gaining confidence in the job, to the point of challenging one’s assumptions, which could be very useful in this sort of situation.

‘He’s such a quiet, shy sort of man. It can’t have been easy,’ Rozie went on.

‘Perhaps,’ the Queen granted. ‘I agree that it is very unusual for an old-fashioned sort of peer, shall we say, such as Hugh, to be so open to the idea. When so much is at stake.’

‘At stake, ma’am?’ Rozie asked.

‘Ask Sir Simon,’ the Queen said, cryptically. And then, more cryptically still, ‘And then, there are the dogs.’

‘The dogs?’ Rozie echoed, feeling increasingly lost.

‘Exactly,’ the Queen said. ‘The dogs are at the heart of everything. I’d like to know more about Valentine,’ she added, thoughtfully. ‘Mr Wallace’s wife was close to Lee. I wonder if she knew something. Can you see if you can dig a little deeper?’

‘In that case—’ Rozie began.

The Queen shook her head. ‘But not in the way the police imagine. I hope I’m wrong. Let me know how you get on.’

There was nothing for it. Rozie and Katie Briggs had spent the afternoon driving up the coast in Rozie’s Mini, trying to work out ways of finding out more about Laura Wallace that didn’t involve getting up at dawn in order to get freezing cold in an icy river with the Dix Dunkers.

Rozie thought back to hot nights in Lagos nightclubs last spring, and evenings on the sand in St Barts last summer. They were her happy places. However, she knew Mary Collathorn, and had an open invitation to join the group. Any other way of infiltrating the Ladybridge Estate that she and Katie could think of would seem obvious and might be reported back to Flora. They had to assume that someone would talk because, usually, someone did.

There was little Rozie wouldn’t do for the Boss, but this remained in her ‘not if I can possibly help it’ pile.

‘You’ll love it,’ Katie said. ‘Trust me. I started wild swimming in the summer. It’s changed my life. I honestly had no energy before I started. There’s something about the cold water on your skin, what it does to your heart rate . . . It’s the most beautiful sensation.’

‘I think the active word then was “summer”,’ Rozie said. ‘If this was July, I’d happily do it. It’s January. A man literally died.’

Katie shook her head. ‘He stayed out too long, deliberately. We know that. You’d only be in the water for a few seconds.’

‘Why me?’ Rozie asked, not unreasonably. ‘You’re the wild swimmer.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You know the ins and outs of it better than I do. You’ve done it before. It’d probably be safer if you went.’

Katie let out an angry sigh. ‘I just can’t. Maybe it would go OK, maybe it wouldn’t. The shock of water that freezing . . . If I overdo it, I pay the price for days. I can’t risk it. Believe me, I wish I could. Pushing through only makes it worse.’

‘OK,’ Rozie said.

Katie squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. She was clearly still struggling with talking about whatever it was. Rozie was surprised, because she literally glowed with health.

‘It’s ME,’ Katie said eventually. ‘Myalgic encephalomyelitis. I’ve had it for years. I only realised while I was doing the APS job. It practically floored me. No, it totally floored me.’

‘Myalgic . . .?’

‘Chronic fatigue syndrome. The one where people say, “Is that a real thing?” and yeah. It’s a thing. Not everyone believed me, but it is.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You don’t need to be. I get extreme tiredness, like just-been-hit-by-a-truck exhaustion. I can sleep for a day and not feel better. Like I say, I’d been having symptoms for a long time, but I had these coping methods for getting through. At the palace, though . . . it’s a whole new level. You can’t take time off if the Queen needs you.’

‘I get that.’

‘You’re frowning.’

Rozie shook the thought off. ‘Only that Sir Simon said it was mental health problems. At least, I thought he did.’

Katie rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, he would have done. He just saw someone stressed who wasn’t up to the job. He tried to be sympathetic, but you could see his massive frustration. It didn’t help.’

‘I bet.’

‘I remember, when we came here for Christmas and there were days I just couldn’t move. Mrs Maddox thought I was malingering. She said her staff had better things to do than bring me breakfast in bed. In the end, Lady Caroline found a consultant for me. He’d worked with her great-niece who has it, too. Even her just believing me was such a relief, I can’t tell you. Anyway, he put me in touch with this new programme. I needed a new diet, new exercise regime, no stress, no pressure. I needed to stop, basically. You took over. I was going to move in with my mother, but she didn’t know how to look after me. The Boss said I could come here.’

‘But you’re getting better, right?’ Rozie asked.

‘It’s a different life,’ Katie admitted. ‘I’m still working it out. I miss the old me. I miss being taken seriously by people in smart offices with fancy titles. God, I sound so self-indulgent. I’ve got Daphne, and I can bake now. I’ve gone totally Marie Kondo. I can knit. I’m doing a degree in nutrition so I can get to the bottom of what works for me. Just don’t make me hit the freezing water, OK? Anyway, like I say, you’ll love it.’

‘I can absolutely promise you,’ Rozie assured her, ‘I won’t.’

The Queen, meanwhile, was visiting Wood Farm with Philip. They were out towards the marshes, where the Boxing Day shoot had started. This was where Philip would retire to the modest farmhouse in less than a year. He was already looking forward to a life of painting, birdwatching and visits from friends. The Queen loved the little farmhouse, too, where it was possible to relax without servants or fuss, with the rugby on the radio and an uninterrupted view of the sky towards the sea.

She would visit as often as she could, though she knew he would manage perfectly well without her, and even better without the panoply of advisers and attendants who inevitably followed in her wake. Today, meanwhile, they were outside in their coats and binoculars, walking back from the hides Philip had had built so they could watch the waterfowl side by side.

‘You’re looking thoughtful, Lilibet,’ he said. ‘Anything up?’

She was glad he’d asked. She wanted to talk to him about something. He was one of the few people who would understand her concerns without thinking them medieval – which in many ways they were.

‘It’s Hugh St Cyr,’ she said.

‘I’m not surprised. Still grieving hard for Lee, no doubt. It was good of you to visit yesterday.’

‘It wasn’t exactly that.’ She looked across at her husband, who was as always adapting his long stride to match her much shorter one, and bending down slightly to listen. ‘It was something he said about Valentine. Hugh sounded very forward-thinking. Rozie was most impressed.’

Philip glanced at her sharply. ‘Forward-thinking? Hugh? Are you sure?’

‘I know. I was surprised, too.’

‘I always had him down as mentally stuck in the Renaissance. Solid man, very sound. But many’s the time I’ve talked about one of my innovations on the farm and he’s raised his eyebrow at me a good half-inch. I mean, the man’s an expert on the Metaphysical poets, for God’s sake.’

‘Mmm,’ the Queen agreed. ‘And yet, he’s leaving Ladybridge to Flora in his will.’

‘Is he?’

‘And Valentine’s getting married.’

‘What? Really? To a girl? I thought he was with that feller who came round at Christmas. Business partner, my foot.’

‘He is.’

For the first time, Philip paused in his stride. ‘He’s marrying him?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what does Hugh think about it all?’

‘He seems pleased that it will put the St Cyrs in the history books.’

‘What?’ Philip shook his head. ‘But . . . There are no other St Cyr male heirs around, are there?’

‘No. Not close family. The line will die out.’

‘And Hugh’s pleased?’

The Queen nodded, to him and to herself. She wasn’t being absurd to think this situation unusual.

Philip knew what she knew – and what Sir Simon would explain to Rozie, if she asked: that it was impossible in the British aristocracy for a male married couple to produce a legitimate heir. A peer of the realm could have as many children as he liked, in wedlock and out of it, adopted or whatever he chose, but only the genetic child of married parents could inherit the title. It was the law, and there were forces that wanted to change it, along with the stipulation that the child who inherited should if at all possible be male, but they weren’t making much headway.

Surrogacy didn’t count because the genetic parents weren’t married, even if the legal parents were. Therefore, as it was impossible for two men, or two women, to produce a child that genetically belonged to both of them, gay married aristocrats could not pass their titles down. Which might perhaps explain why so far there had not been a single such couple. A man might subsequently marry his gay partner, having ‘done his duty’ and created an heir within a heterosexual marriage, and no doubt that would happen in time, but it hadn’t yet. Anyway, Valentine wasn’t doing that. This would be his first wedding. In fact, he was forty-seven and until now he seemed to have been in no rush to marry at all. And under no pressure from his father to do so. All Hugh’s attention was on his daughter. This, too, was strange.

‘Hugh was quite offhand when he mentioned it,’ the Queen said.

Philip frowned. The thing was, he understood all the implications instantly. A nobleman who didn’t care who his children slept with was not unusual, but one who didn’t care about who they married, and the consequent loss of lands or titles, was as rare as a unicorn.

There was a pause as they stopped to admire a couple of plump partridge stalking ahead of them up the path to the farmhouse.

‘Did you ever get a sense of Hugh’s relationship with Valentine?’ she asked. ‘Hugh used to bring him shooting when Valentine was a teenager. You talked to them then, didn’t you?’

‘I did. The boy was a top-class shot. Very coordinated, very composed. Excellent fieldcraft – better than his father’s. I always thought he’d go on to do more with it, but then he drifted off to London and never came back.’

‘And were he and Hugh close?’

Philip snorted dismissively. ‘Name me one teenager out of boarding school who’s close to his father.’

The Queen could name several, but chose not to. ‘They weren’t unusually distant, though?’ she asked.

Philip gazed up at the sky while he tried to remember. ‘Come to think of it, they were, I suppose. Not distant, but disconnected. I don’t remember them ever talking to each other, unless it was about one of the dogs. I put it down to Hugh being so infernally shy.’

The Queen was struck by the word ‘disconnected’. That was it, absolutely. She had wondered if Hugh was acting his indifference. The man who had removed the wolfsbane from the poison garden all those years ago was anything but. However, something had changed since then. She didn’t put it down to Valentine’s homosexuality. Ned’s uncle Patrick was homosexual, too, and the St Cyrs had treated it as just another family eccentricity – on the understanding he would go on to marry a good woman. No, there was something else. And Ned, she sensed, was at the heart of it.

Chapter 25

Was this what her world had come to?

Rozie pictured her friends in London, Lagos and New York, grabbing cappuccinos on their way into work in gleaming skyscrapers and cool workspaces, swapping stories about hot men in cocktail bars and deals they were about to do. And here she was, at the end of the world, with a group of people twice her age, about to make herself truly miserable.

It was half past seven in the morning and the sun was still rising. She stood on an old wooden jetty that stuck out into the dark green waters of the river Dix at Vickery, wearing nothing but a towel and a swimming costume, feeling the ice forming on her skin. There were four people with her, two men and two women, two string-thin and two more generously endowed, all paper-white in the unforgiving early morning light.

Katie had told her she would love it. At this moment, Katie was tucked up in bed under a nice, thick duvet. What would she know?

‘Are you ready? Don’t forget, two full minutes,’ Mary Collathorn said. ‘Thirty seconds for you, Rozie, ’cause you’re a beginner. Shoulders submerged or you don’t get the benefit. Ready, steady, go!’

Mary climbed carefully down the jetty steps, whooping with shock as she entered the freezing water. Her bright red swimming hat was swiftly joined by the green, blue and white hats of her companions. Rozie went last. As expected, the water stung her shins and ankles with icy fury and she had to force herself to keep descending into it. Every atom of her being told her to save herself. Her only thought was to get deep enough to cover her shoulders quickly, and to get back out as fast as she dared.

The others were swimming to the opposite bank and back, whooping and hollering their way through the shock of the cold. Rozie had let out a single loud gasp when she got in, but now she experimented with joining in with the hollering. It helped, and there was something joyful about them all expressing the craziness of this together. Even so, she wasn’t sure what hurt most, her stomach, chest or shoulders. Every part of her protested at the shock. Her instinct was to leap away from it and get the hell out, but she fought it.

Mary had said thirty seconds. Rozie wasn’t sure she’d last twenty – but after ten, her skin felt as if it was vibrating. It was a strange new sensation. Definitely not horrible. She remembered to breathe, and found that with each new breath the pain adjusted into something that was more of a thrill. As she slowly moved through the water, she gained new power with each stroke. The view of the bank was gorgeous from here. When Mary shouted ‘Thirty seconds!’ Rozie ignored her. After forty, Mary positively yelled at her and Rozie reluctantly got out.

Her heart was pumping hard. Every square inch of her skin tingled as she climbed back up the steps towards her towel. She felt vividly alive, and quite jealous of the other four, whose colourful hats bobbed on the water’s surface like billiard balls as they endured and enjoyed the final minute. By the time they came back out to join her, she was wrapped up in her towel (they had told her to bring an extra large one, and she was grateful), and feeling as warm, awake and alert as she had ever been.

‘What did you think?’ Mary asked, slipping into her own towel, which had sleeves and became a warm, puffy coat when she put it on.

‘Bloody brilliant,’ Rozie yelled. ‘Why doesn’t everyone do this?’

‘I know!’ Mary agreed. ‘Sometimes it takes a few more sessions but I’m glad you’re a convert. Coffee? We usually go back to my place before we go our separate ways.’

Being very cold had – to Rozie’s great surprise – been very good, but being warmly dressed in a cashmere sweater and jeans, drinking very good coffee around Mary’s pine kitchen table was fantastic.

‘Oh, yes,’ Alan said with a broad smile when Rozie pointed it out. ‘Everyone thinks we do it for the freezing sea, but we do it for the buzz on the jetty afterwards. And this. We’re not masochists.’

‘Not much,’ said the woman sitting next to him at the table. Her name was Renée, aged about sixty, Rozie guessed, and a ‘new girl’ on the estate, meaning she had only arrived eleven years ago. She specialised in white and dove-grey furniture for the recent explosion in tasteful seaside Airbnbs. ‘I’m an artist, really,’ she’d explained, with a certain aggressive earnestness. ‘Are you into art, Rozie?’ Rozie hadn’t explained that she possessed her very own Cézanne. She had come by it in highly unusual circumstances, which she didn’t want to talk about.

The fourth member of the original swimming group, a man called John, had already gone home, so Rozie just had Mary, Alan and Renée to talk to. She knew what would happen next, and let them ask her the inevitable questions about what the Queen was up to at Sandringham, and whether she’d recovered from her cold, and what it was like to work for her.

‘An honour,’ Rozie said.

‘No, but, really,’ Mary asked. ‘Is she a very demanding boss? She must be.’

Rozie answered on autopilot, without giving anything away, as usual. Privately, she was asking herself if the Boss was very demanding? Of course she was in terms of the excellence she expected – and generally got – from everyone around her, but perhaps not in the way Mary intended. She was never rude, never unfair. Rozie had worked for officers in the army and senior managers at the bank who were more unpredictable and difficult. All her careers so far had expected her to sacrifice her time and freedom, to be available day and night to get the job done, to give up on much hope of a decent social life of her own. Maybe she chose them because that was how she was made. Did she want a social life? Her sister had a huge one that spanned three continents, but Rozie didn’t envy it. As she pondered these things, she talked about the corgis and the Queen’s recent birthday celebrations at Windsor Castle, and everyone was happy. Then, before they ran out of time, she brought the conversation around to Chris Wallace as gently as she could.

‘I keep thinking about what you told me,’ she said to Mary, ‘about Mr Wallace worrying about losing all those memories of his wife when he lost the house. It sounds heartbreaking.’

‘It was,’ Mary said grimly. ‘Those St Cyrs are total, stuck-up bastards, whatever anyone says. They’ve got the reputation for being generous and caring, with the lamb boxes at Easter and Flora going round like Lady Muck if anyone’s off sick, but we know the truth now.’

‘And you said the Wallaces were friends of theirs?’

‘Well, Laura thought she was Lee’s friend,’ Mary said. ‘Clearly not. But the aristocracy are another country, aren’t they? They do things differently there. Without Laura, they wouldn’t have kept their flock of Norfolk Horns going, and that’s one of the things that makes Ladybridge special. When Lee had her breakdown, it was Laura who picked up the pieces and put her back together. Not the baron – he was useless.’

‘The baroness had a breakdown?’ Renée leaned forward, fascinated, and saved Rozie asking the question. ‘When was that? I didn’t know.’

‘Mmm,’ Mary said. ‘It was a long time ago, when Valentine and his sister were kids. Laura lived next to the school and she had a boy the same age as Valentine, so it was easy. I always had the impression Valentine had done something.’

‘Oh? How?’ Rozie asked.

‘Dunno,’ Mary said, frowning. ‘No, wait. I remember, we were outside church and I was asking Laura how Lee was – this was in the middle of the crisis – and she said nothing much, she was very discreet, but Valentine was standing about ten feet from us, just an ordinary boy about eleven or twelve, and the look Laura gave him! Of course, after that we didn’t see him much. He went off to boarding school and I’ll tell you one thing, before that, Lee had vowed her kids wouldn’t go away. She’d always said there was a perfectly good secondary school at Swaffham they could go to. I admired her for that. But then suddenly Valentine was gone and I did ask why, but Laura simply wouldn’t talk about it. She stuck by Lee to the bitter end, and look what they did to her. Turned her beloved Chris out of his house for no good reason. Rumour is, Flora wants it for her London guests, because it’s warmer than the hall. I wouldn’t put it past them.’

‘Flora isn’t popular on the estate, then?’ Rozie asked.

‘She was,’ Alan said, hesitating a little. ‘But that was before all this. You get to see a person in a new light sometimes. It’s no coincidence that this all happened after her mother died in the summer. The baroness was good at holding everything together. It’s falling apart now.’

They chatted on for a while about the fund that was being set up in Chris’s memory to give to his favourite wildlife charities. Rozie sensed that was all she was going to learn. Laura Wallace had protected her secrets. If she had told them to anyone, it would have been to the man she shared her life with, and he was dead.

The Queen fiddled with her spectacles. ‘It’s unfortunate for us that Laura was so loyal to the baroness. Lee chose her friends well. She was like that herself, you know. My mother always said that you could tell her anything and be certain it would go no further. She was enormously fond of Lee.’ She frowned up at Rozie. ‘You seem surprised.’

Rozie shook her head. ‘Only that there must have been a big age gap between them, ma’am. Two generations. The baroness must have been about the same age as the Prince of Wales.’

‘She was,’ the Queen said. ‘But my mother was never concerned about age. She always had great energy herself. She liked young people.’

‘And I suppose they shared a great love of gardening,’ Rozie said.

‘Oh, yes,’ the Queen said, her face lighting up at the memory. ‘She visited the gardens at Ladybridge almost every summer. She thought very highly of Lee St Cyr’s design skills. She was delighted when Lee offered to help with the formal gardens here. They were both avid visitors to other people’s gardens. They used to share notes. When Lee went to Japan she wrote about ten pages. My mother read them out to me . . .’ She trailed off, lost in thought, momentarily.

‘Ma’am?’ Rozie asked.

The Queen’s eyes glittered with sudden intensity. ‘Lee didn’t confide in many people, but . . . Didn’t you say that when Laura Wallace gave Valentine that odd look, it was shortly before he went to boarding school?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he was eleven or twelve?’

‘That’s right.’

‘It’s a bit old for a boy to go away to prep school in those days. He would normally be seven or eight. But Lee hadn’t wanted him to go at all, had she?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘I get the impression she needed to get him away from the hall. Away from his father. If Valentine is nearly fifty now . . .’

‘He’s forty-seven, ma’am,’ Rozie said.

‘Then whatever happened would have been around thirty-five years ago, which would make it . . .’

‘Nineteen eighty-one,’ Rozie added helpfully.

‘Hmm.’ The Queen continued to play with her spectacles for a little bit while she thought the thing through. ‘My mother’s correspondence is not in the most perfect state,’ she admitted. Margaret had been living with their mother at the end of her life and had disposed of some of it. The Queen Mother wasn’t always entirely discreet. However, she had been a prolific letter writer and there was still a lot left. ‘You’ll need to talk to the archivist at Windsor. You know her, don’t you?’

Rozie did. She was a friendly woman and fellow owner of a Mini Cooper. They had bonded over cars when the Boss was there over Easter.

‘Good,’ the Queen said. ‘You might ask for all the letters my mother received from anyone in Norfolk three years either side of 1980. Ask for any that she sent, too. Sometimes they end up in the collection. Do explain that time is of the essence.’

‘Of course, ma’am.’

‘It’s a long shot,’ the Queen observed grimly.

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

After Rozie left, the Queen turned to gaze out of the window. She didn’t return to her private correspondence for quite some time.

Chapter 26

The Queen’s mobile telephone wasn’t working. The grandchildren had insisted she have one, and had recorded a rude message on her answering machine, which she hadn’t found out about for ages. Not that it particularly mattered, because they were the only people who called her on it. She liked to use it to catch up on the news sometimes, which is what she intended to do now, while drinking her morning cup of Darjeeling in bed.

It was the twenty-first of January and, the day after the inauguration, in cities around the world, women were massing to protest the words and actions of a president who had cheerfully admitted to grabbing them in private places. What was the world coming to? The Queen had known all sorts of world leaders who almost certainly (or definitely) had done such things, but none so far who had bragged about it. She was curious, and somewhat cheered, to see women banding together for the marches. Or, she would have been, if she could have seen anything – but her phone was a blank block.

She called her dresser and pointed out the problem.

‘Oh! I’m so sorry, ma’am. Someone forgot to charge it last night. I’ll do that for you now.’

It took a few minutes to locate the charger and get the inert block to start up again. In that time, the Queen finished her tea and eyed up the charger thoughtfully. ‘Ah,’ she muttered to herself. But nobody heard.

‘Do you know,’ Sir Simon said to Rozie, leaning back in his office chair as he tried to remember what it was like to feel relaxed, ‘this time last year the words Trump and Brexit were curiosities? We were all so sure we knew what was going to happen. We didn’t question ourselves for a moment.’

‘You’ve been teaching me history,’ Rozie said. ‘“Events, dear boy, events.”’

‘Ah, yes, Macmillan. He didn’t exactly say it that way, but he should have. Events, dear Rozie. I underestimated the events.’

‘The Boss doesn’t seem unduly worried,’ Rozie pointed out.

‘About the new world order? She never does. She’s lived through a war that we can barely imagine. She’s lost an Empire and gained a Commonwealth. She survived Lady Di.’ He sat up straight. ‘I must be more Queen. Less self-indulgent. How can I help you?’

‘Did you see this?’ she asked. She showed him a headline on her phone:

‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘Sorry, forgot to tell you. Bloomfield called last night. A fisherman’s come forward. Lady Mundy used to keep a clinker at King’s Lynn, to sail on the Ouse. He saw Valentine St Cyr on the boat, heading out into the Wash on the twenty-first of December. That puts him in the exact place the hand probably went in. But more than that, he had consistently refused to say what he was doing that day. You’d think, if you were perfectly innocent in such suspicious circumstances, you’d let the police know before they found out for themselves and tell your side of the story, wouldn’t you? Or perhaps you’d deny it entirely. Anyway, he doesn’t deny it now. He claims he was scattering his mother’s ashes.

‘You’re seeing the Boss next, aren’t you? Do tell her. She’ll be horrified, because she’s known the man since he was a baby. But justice is justice. She’ll be reconciled, eventually.’

‘I see.’

The Queen seemed unsurprised when Rozie passed on the news about the ashes scattering. ‘Yes, that explains everything. He probably was.’

She stared at the blotter on her desk for quite some time. ‘I think I need to make a telephone call. I can’t imagine Valentine would come all the way to Norfolk and take the family boat out on his own. He came as rarely as he could, from what I understand.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Wait there.’

Rozie stood by, while the Queen asked the palace operator to put her through to Hugh St Cyr.

But in the end, it was Flora who came on the line.

‘Hello, Your Majesty. I’m afraid Dad’s visiting the stables. Can I help?’

The Queen was suitably sympathetic about the arrest of her brother, but Flora sounded defiant.

‘Valentine’ll be out in no time. He’s innocent, so they have nothing to charge him with. It’s just a bore that he has to be in the news. You know how it is.’

‘I do,’ the Queen said. ‘I’m sure the family’s rallying round.’

‘We absolutely are,’ Flora assured her.

‘Presumably you were all together when he took the boat out?’

There was a strangled cough, then silence. Poor Flora. The Queen felt her shock at being asked the question – and being asked it by her sovereign, suddenly, in conversation, and not by a police inspector, in an interview. She sounded rattled when she answered. ‘Yes, we were, ma’am. Of course we were. It was a family outing – long planned.’

‘Scattering Lee’s ashes, I understand. Another difficult day.’

Flora rallied, gaining confidence as she went. ‘Oh, it could have been worse, but I suppose it could have gone better. Mum didn’t want to be in the vault, poor thing. The idea drove her crazy. She wanted to be in the sea, and in her rose garden. She was very specific about it all. We’d already scattered the rose garden half. We arranged the boat bit around Val’s schedule, but I assure you it was all perfectly, perfectly innocent. It was a blustery day and we were quite incompetent sailors without Mum. When the wind kicked up, half the ashes ended up in our faces.’

‘Oh, dear.’

‘It was almost funny, really, in a horrible sort of way. We were all busy brushing her off each other. Dad had ash in his eyebrows. Of course we should have checked the wind direction, but we were idiots. Our minds were on other things.’

The Queen could picture the scene exactly. Now she was in her stride, Flora told the story with a hint of a groan and her usual panache. It sounded like exactly the sort of anecdote she would tell, in fact. The Queen was surprised – or rather, she would have been surprised if she didn’t have her current suspicions – that the girl had waited until now to talk about it.

She felt growing certainty about how the deed was done, but as things stood, the wrong person entirely had died. And that was rather a ‘deal-breaker’, as Harry would say, when it came to getting to the bottom of a murder.

An hour later, Sir Simon returned to deliver his report and discuss the prime minister’s upcoming trip to America. After a discussion of the special relationship, which seemed to be worryingly less special with each new US incumbent, he handed the Queen a basket of private correspondence to look through, and tapped a big, padded envelope at the top.

‘It’s just arrived. Rozie asked me to bring it to your attention, ma’am. Apparently, the archivist has found the letters from the Queen Mother that you asked about. One of the junior equerries was travelling from Windsor this morning and he brought them with him.’

‘Goodness!’ the Queen said. ‘How quick. She must have worked through the night.’

‘The archivist? She’s very diligent, ma’am.’

‘Thank you, Simon.’

She picked the envelope off the pile. Normally ‘Thank you, Simon’ was the equivalent of ‘Goodbye’, and he knew it, and yet when she glanced up, he was hovering. She looked at him questioningly. ‘Yes?’

His own face burned with suppressed curiosity. Of course he wanted to know what was inside, and why she wanted it so badly. He couldn’t ask her outright about private letters from her own family, but he was clearly hoping she’d tell him anyway. There was a brief stand-off, while neither spoke. Eventually, he gave in.

‘That will be all, I take it,’ he said.

‘Thank you, Simon,’ she repeated firmly.

He shut the door behind him and she pulled the letters out.

There were about three dozen in all. Her mother had been a prolific letter writer, with many friends in Norfolk who eagerly wrote back. It did not take long, however, to winkle out the ones from Ladybridge Hall. They were all on the same thick cream paper, embossed with the family crest and the address in blue. Georgina’s had looked the same, the Queen remembered, but her signature had taken up half the page. These were all signed ‘Lee’, in a much smaller hand.

It was disappointing that none of her mother’s letters to the baroness were in the bundle. The Queen Mother’s writing style was warm and witty, very true to her character, and seemed to bring her back to life whenever one read it. However, there were seven letters from Lee to the queen, which was more than one could have hoped for. The bundle had come with a note from the archivist saying she always did her best to put the contents in chronological order, but it wasn’t always possible, given that so many of them weren’t dated. This proved to be true of Lee, who had a maddening habit of giving the month and day at the top of each one, but not the year.

At least her handwriting was legible. It was rounded and uneven, with curly ‘y’s and a long strike through the ‘t’ that reminded the Queen of Anne’s letters from school, in the same blue ink, but it was steady, with decent spacing, and not difficult to scan. The Queen was looking for the strong, confident ‘V’ for Valentine. Lee spoke a lot about Flora, who was learning to ride. She asked questions about the weather in Balmoral, made endless suggestions for roses and wrote several pages about a trip to the Chelsea Flower Show. She was planning a trip to America to talk to various gardening societies about her work at Ladybridge. And then, in the fifth letter, there was this:

The Queen sat up straighter. She went back to the beginning. The letter began,

Maddeningly, Lee then went on to say that she couldn’t bring herself to burden ‘Your Majesty’ with her ‘disaster’. Only that she ‘could hardly bear to be in her own skin’, that it had all started because of ‘a simple trip to hospital, a silly thing, really’, and that she must ‘get Valentine away from here’. At the time, she was planning to send the children to stay with a friend across the county. Another line caught the Queen’s attention:

The next letter was all about Flora’s first day on the jumps at Pony Club. It must have been out of sequence, because the final one in the bundle was an apology for the priest-hole letter, and was an attempt at reassurance, although the Queen wondered how reassuring her mother would have found it.

The Queen looked up. Moira had been mentioned once or twice in the other letters. She knew several Moiras, but only two who were old enough to have been confidantes to Lee St Cyr in the late 1970s, and one of them lived in the Bahamas. The other lived in a Georgian manor house, half an hour’s drive due east of Sandringham. She was Moira Westover, the mother of Astrid, who had so recently got engaged to Ned St Cyr.

She picked up the phone and explained what she needed to Lady Caroline.

Chapter 27

Moira Westover stood at the doorway to her home just outside the Pensthorpe Natural Park and watched the Queen’s cars draw up through narrowed eyes. This was not the reception the Queen was used to. Normally, her hosts were in their Sunday best and their faces were tight with excessive smiling. Moira wore a padded gilet over narrow jeans tucked into well-worn Dubarry boots. Her mouth was a set line, her expression wary.

But then, this visit was an unusual one. Lady Caroline had checked that Moira would be at home, but stressed that the conversation would be brief, private and informal. The Queen really didn’t want to sit through a very long tea, or several earwigging friends and relations. Moira had taken her at her word, it seemed. Unlike her daughter, she had made no visible effort at all.

The two-storey house, with its elegant Georgian windows, was surrounded by a garden big enough to house a swimming pool and a grass tennis court, next to paddocks where half a dozen horses grazed. This was where Astrid had grown up, the fourth and youngest child of Moira and David who, in his lifetime, was known as one of the best shots, and most prolific alcoholics, in the county. The Queen had known an alcoholic or two in her lifetime, and knew that their loved ones had to learn to be self-reliant. They were used to being lied to by people they should trust, which perhaps explained the suspicion in Moira’s eyes today. The Queen knew Moira from the Pony Club circuit, where she had ridden with Anne. As an adult, she had accompanied her husband on various Sandringham shooting parties – but it was hardly enough to explain why the reigning monarch would want to drop in on her at twenty-four hours’ notice. The Queen knew she had some explaining to do.

‘Is there something you need to tell me?’ Moira asked urgently, as they sat awkwardly opposite each other in the pristine silk-swagged sitting room. Her taut face and ramrod spine radiated tension.

‘Not exactly,’ the Queen said. ‘But I think there might be something you can tell me.’

Moira looked puzzled. ‘I’ll try.’

‘What did you think I’d come to say?’

‘It had to be something about Ned,’ Moira responded. ‘I thought that . . . After you were kind enough to talk to Astrid . . . I thought the police had told you something truly dark about Ned. What’s happened to him, I mean. And you were telling me so I could tell my daughter.’

‘Oh, no!’ the Queen assured her. ‘Nothing like that. I’m still waiting to find out as much as you are.’ Though I have my suspicions, she thought. One day soon, she suspected, Moira would have to comfort Astrid through very difficult times. But not today.

‘Oh, thank goodness.’ Moira recovered herself. ‘What did you want to know?’

‘I was looking through some of my mother’s letters recently and they mentioned that Baroness Mundy went through a particularly difficult moment. It was when the children were quite young. Valentine had just gone to hospital, I think. And you looked after Lee.’

Moira stiffened again. ‘Yes, I did, briefly. Why?’

The Queen ignored the question. ‘Since her death, a lot has happened. But I think it all goes back to that moment. Lee was a good friend of my mother’s. Sadly, I can’t ask her about it, so I’m asking you.’

Moira pursed her lips. ‘I can’t quite believe I’m saying this, ma’am, but I can’t help you. I made a promise to Lee at that time. Her secrets were her secrets. I haven’t told a soul.’

‘I believe you,’ the Queen said. ‘I think I know what those secrets might be and I haven’t heard any talk to that effect, so she protected them well. She trusted the right people.’

‘I like to think so.’

‘It’s all very admirable, but there’s a murderer at large. I believe we should all do what we can for the sake of justice. Can I tell you what I suspect?’

Moira agreed that she could.

‘As far as I’m aware,’ the Queen began, ‘Valentine St Cyr had two hospital scares as a boy. The first time, he was about six and he accidentally ate poison. His father was beside himself. If anything, Hugh was more frightened for his son than Lee was. The second time, a few years later, Hugh was so angry at whatever had happened that Lee felt she had to remove Valentine from his sight. I wonder if, that second time, the problem required some sort of blood test and the doctors discovered in the process that Hugh could not be Valentine’s father.’

Moira gave the Queen a steady look and didn’t say anything. The Queen carried on.

‘I’ve always liked Hugh, and I’m sorry to think he was so unkind to the boy, but what if he suspected that the real father was his cousin, Ned? Valentine looks like a typical St Cyr – he has the height and hair, the distinctive profile. Who else could have given him those features? I wonder if Valentine himself saw it, too, at Lee’s funeral, when Ned attended. That was the first time he had met him in person, as far as I know. There is something about meeting a relative in person that’s different from seeing them in photographs. One can have an extra sense of them that can’t always be explained. I’ve often had that feeling myself.’

Moira looked down, considering what to say. ‘And Hugh suspected an affair, you mean?’ she asked eventually. ‘That Lee had been unfaithful with his cousin?’

‘It seems an obvious conclusion,’ the Queen said. ‘Lee knew Ned first. I can imagine that would be very difficult for a man to come to terms with. Very difficult indeed.’

Moira tipped her head back and regarded the Queen speculatively through half-lowered lids. ‘It would be, wouldn’t it?’ Then she got up, went to the kitchen and came back with her handbag. She took out a slim, black pen-like object and held it up. ‘D’you mind if I vape?’

The Queen had grown up in a fug of her father’s smoke. She still missed it sometimes. ‘Please do,’ she said.

Moira closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. When she opened them again, the look she gave the Queen was cool and uncompromising.

‘I’ll tell you the story because you’ve guessed half of it, and like anyone would, you’ve guessed it wrong. But I’ll only tell you, ma’am, and if anyone in the police or anywhere else asks me, I’ll deny it – under oath or whatever you like. I gave Lee a sacred promise. I think she’d make an exception for you, though.’ Moira half laughed. ‘And possibly the Pope.’

‘Good,’ the Queen said. ‘I’ve come all this way, after all.’

Moira nodded. ‘Lee met Ned through friends when he was nineteen and she was twenty,’ she began. ‘They often went to parties together – there were so many in those days – and she thought of him as a fun friend and useful companion because she didn’t have a boyfriend. There was a bit of kissing, a bit of fumbling in the haystacks after a Young Farmers ball. Lee was a free spirit that way, she said. Ned was magnetic, hugely popular, and she loved to live in the moment. But she was incredibly innocent, too.

‘And then she met Hugh, and everything changed. Her life went overnight from black and white to colour – that’s how she put it. She was a guest at a hunt ball up in Yorkshire. Ned wasn’t there, but her brother had brought Hugh along. At first she was intrigued by the cousins’ similarities. But where Ned was shallow, Hugh was deep. Ned could be selfish and unreliable, and up to then she’d assumed all young men were, but Hugh was honest and devoted. Her still waters, she called him. She fell for him hard in the space of a weekend and never changed her mind. You know how much fun she was, how gregarious, but there was an inner quality of calm to her, too. Hugh saw it and mirrored it. As soon as you saw them together you could tell they were right.’

‘Yes, I always thought so,’ the Queen agreed.

‘Ned hated it. He always just assumed Hugh had met Lee through him, because he knew her first. He had his eye on all sorts of girls in those days, but to hear him tell the tale, you’d think she was the only one. He wasn’t really in his right mind at all. His uncle Patrick had died in a horrible car crash two years before. He was still coming to terms with the fact that Hugh’s father Ralph was the new heir. He’d grown up always assuming he would live on the estate somehow and be a part of it. Patrick had led him to believe he could become manager in time. But overnight, Hugh, who’d always just been one of the unimportant cousins, became the heir. He’d taken Ned’s birthright – as Ned saw it – and now he’d taken his girl.’

‘Yes, that’s what I rather imagined,’ the Queen said.

‘A month before her wedding to Hugh, Lee turned twenty-one. Ned offered to organise a party for her at Ladybridge, as of course he’d often done before. He was famous for his parties.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Georgina was in the process of moving into Abbottswood, and she was very bitter about leaving Ladybridge Hall. Lee knew all this. She told me she thought Ned was very sweet and generous to come back to his old ancestral home and sprinkle his magic one last time. It seemed to be a sign that the cousins would eventually make up and get on together, which is what she wanted. Lee only ever wanted people to get on. She was very naive that way.’ Moira eyed the Queen sideways through a scented haze of vape smoke.

‘It’s not such a bad ideal to aspire to, surely?’

‘But quite impossible,’ Moira said. ‘She shouldn’t have let Ned organise the party. She should have realised what it would put him through.’

‘And what did it put him through?’ the Queen asked.

‘Well, according to Lee, he started drinking early that night. There was a certain wildness about him. He kept on ensuring her glass was topped up, too. Lee was terribly nervous, knowing that one day she would be chatelaine of Ladybridge, with the tenants, the farms and entertaining . . . and she found all that sort of thing quite terrifying at the time.

‘He’d lit the courtyard with a thousand bulbs and installed a dance floor. She danced with Hugh there, and then again in the lush grass of the pasture, just the two of them, while music drifted across the moat. She said that was one of her fondest memories. Then they went back and joined their guests and partied until it was almost dawn.’

‘It sounds delightful. But it didn’t end there, I take it,’ the Queen said.

‘Well, no,’ Moira agreed. ‘Hugh “Still Waters” St Cyr went to bed. He and Lee were being very correct. She intended to be a virgin until her wedding night even though it was the late nineteen-sixties, but lots of girls were still like that. But – oh, I remember now – she told me that with Hugh being so close, and the moon, and all that champagne, she was very tempted to say to hell with it, with only four weeks to go. She was plucking up the courage to follow him to his bedroom, when she ran into Ned in the corridor outside the billiard room where they’d been drinking, and he told her not to go. She assumed he was enforcing her original pact with Hugh, so she agreed. She was grateful, even, the silly girl. But then . . . Ned became very insistent. He was hugely charismatic, as you know. He was twenty-three and very drunk, and he went on some sort of rant about how they should make babies together, how beautiful they would be, how she had always been the only woman he had ever cared about, how their children would inherit Ladybridge following “the true line”. All sorts of rot. She said she tried to talk him out of it, but . . . he was very passionate.’

‘In what way?’ the Queen asked sharply. ‘“Passionate?”’

‘I don’t remember exactly. She said something about him being insistent. You know how men are when they know what they want.’ Moira took another drag of her metal cigarette that looked more like a lighter. ‘We were talking about this ten years later, of course, she and I. I only have her side of it. I never discussed that night with Ned and I wonder if he even remembered it, given how drunk he was. I did ask Lee what she did to fend him off and she said she just went to another place. I rather idiotically asked where, assuming she’d say she ran off to her room or something, but she said she imagined she was floating over her mother’s garden, paying attention to each plant. And that’s all she would say. Whatever it was, I think it took place in the billiard room. She very rarely entered it again, even decades later. I always saw it with its curtains closed. The next day there’s a picture of her saying goodbye to some of the guests in a pretty summer dress. She looks quite carefree. Hugh’s arm is around her shoulder. As if it never happened. Valentine was born nine and a half months later, on February the fourteenth. A honeymoon baby. Hugh chose the name and everyone was thrilled for them.’

‘Did she know?’ the Queen asked. ‘Who the father was? I suppose perhaps she didn’t.’

‘Not then, not for certain – how could she? Valentine was either two weeks early or two weeks late, but pregnancy is such a vague science, isn’t it? The doctors give you an absolute due date and you assume that’s when the baby will come, but it never does. She said she felt it, though. She didn’t know how exactly. But she said she always thought Valentine was an accident waiting to happen. I don’t think she meant “accident” so much as utter, utter disaster. Not her baby boy – she loved him very much. But . . . everything else.’

‘She was worried about Hugh’s reaction? And Valentine’s, too?’

‘Well, certainly Hugh’s. She had no intention of ever telling Valentine. This was long before the days of DNA, of course, but even now, if you don’t take a test, how would you know? And the title and the estate were at stake. She and Hugh didn’t have any other sons as time went by – only Flora. So there was the question of inheritance if it all came out and it turned out they had no legitimate male heirs. Also, Hugh adored her, and she was very worried he might do something idiotic and go to jail if he found out, and the shame it would bring on her was unthinkable.’

‘But it did come out.’

‘Yes. They were very unlucky with that blood test. It was terribly simple: Valentine cut himself quite badly on some barbed wire at the farm and developed septicaemia. They thought they might need to do a transfusion and tested him . . . and I can’t remember what the blood type was – O, I think – but it was about the only one that couldn’t be a product of Hugh’s blood type and Lee’s. Hugh stupidly checked. He should have left well alone.’

‘It’s a natural temptation, I should imagine,’ the Queen said. ‘Given the consequences. I’m sure he did it to reassure himself rather than anything else.’

‘Yes, I suppose so. Lee was laughing at the sheer, unlucky madness of it when she told me.’

‘And what was Hugh’s reaction?’ the Queen pressed.

‘At the time, in the hospital, almost nothing. She said he looked numb. She told him the story on the way home – because up to then they’d told each other everything. This was her one secret. She said she realised how stupid it had been to do it then, because he could have crashed into something and killed somebody. But he didn’t. They got back to Ladybridge. Hugh got very drunk and raged about Ned for a night, then he went quiet. Very quiet. That was almost more frightening, she said. He locked himself away in his study for days, or went walking alone across the fields. That’s when she called for me. Lee was beside herself. She was terrified he’d do something he’d regret. She sent the children away so they wouldn’t antagonise him and begged and pleaded at his study door for him to talk to her. It was dreadful. It lasted for about a week. Then one day I was up in the Long Gallery looking out of the window and I saw Hugh go up to Lee in her rose garden and fall down on one knee, like a gentle knight from one of their tapestries. He kissed her hand. It was all over.’

‘Did you believe that Lee had persuaded him not to do something he’d regret?’ the Queen asked.

‘Yes,’ Moira said simply. ‘Yes, I honestly did, and I still do. She made him promise to do nothing. She knew what it would cost the family if he did anything. Mind you, if it had been something done to me, David would have tracked round there and killed the man on the spot. Hugh’s not like that at all. More’s the pity, in my opinion. Look at him after Lee’s death – he’s shrivelled to practically nothing. He adored her, even in the middle of his white fugue. He’d have done anything for her. I mean, how many men, on realising their wife had a child with another man, would instantly blame the man?’

Moira had a point. The Queen realised she had found this story all too easy to believe, but she knew many, many men – most men, perhaps – who would have at least wondered about such a seemingly convenient explanation.

A thought occurred to her, and she had been so busy thinking of the impact on the St Cyrs all those years ago that she was surprised she hadn’t thought of it before.

‘And you, Moira?’ she asked. ‘Did you believe her?’

‘Of course I did!’ Moira said, surprised even to be asked. ‘I was the only person she confided in at the time. Well, me and the shepherdess. She and Lee were close, too.’

‘And yet, you wanted your daughter to marry Ned next month.’

Moira’s mouth fell open and she stared back, wordlessly. It was as if the thought had only just occurred to her.

‘But . . .’ she said, colouring, ‘it was decades ago! One time. Entirely out of character. And Ned was very drunk, Lee said so.’

‘And yet . . .’ the Queen persisted. She didn’t want to, but she was so astonished that she was trying to make sense of the woman in front of her.

‘Ned’s been a model citizen for decades,’ Moira declared. ‘I know he hasn’t been particularly fortunate with his wives, but he and Astrid were wonderful together. He got the rewilding idea from her and worked so hard on it. He made her so happy.’ The Queen said nothing. ‘And anyway, it can’t have been that bad, what he did. I mean, I’m sure it was a shock, but it’s not like he dragged Lee into the bushes or anything ghastly. She was right as rain the next morning and she didn’t tell a soul. I’m sure she was furious with herself for letting him get away with it, but all she had to do was say no very firmly. Or put a door between them. Astrid would never . . .’

Moira stopped mid-sentence as she caught the Queen’s eye.

There was a long pause. The Queen remembered a young ambassador’s wife who hosted her on a tour not long into her reign. On the first evening of that visit to a distant country, the Queen had caught her hostess’s eye in the mirror, after the smiles and chatter of a convivial evening, while the men were drinking port and the servants were busy and the two women were replenishing their lipstick together. She wasn’t sure what she saw in those eyes, but she had asked if there was something wrong and, after a silence that seemed to last a lifetime, the woman had admitted, calmly and quietly that a senior politician had raped her in that very house two nights before.

She continued to apply her lipstick while she spoke. Her hand trembled, but she was careful. The Queen listened mutely while she described in brisk, bright tones, the attack that had happened in that very room. The act had been over in less than five minutes, she said.

‘I was so absolutely . . . How could he . . .? I couldn’t understand it. My muscles wouldn’t move. Not to speak, protest . . . anything. And so I let it happen. I thought if I didn’t – I still think so – that I would die. Silly, isn’t it? Surely he wouldn’t have killed me here, in my house? And yet . . .’ She looked into the mirror, but neither at herself nor the Queen, who was watching her reflection ‘. . . I watched from far, far away, as if I wasn’t here at all. I thought, when he’d finished, I’d come back to myself, but . . .’ She took a tissue from a box, carefully blotted her lips and fixed on a smile. ‘When it was over, I adjusted my petticoat and carried on with my cocktail party, because, what else could I do?’ She had since hosted a magnificent dinner party which was the talk of the town.

‘Don’t tell anyone, will you?’ she had implored the Queen. ‘I only told you because . . . I don’t know why I told you. I’m so sorry. I just . . . I needed to . . . But I don’t want . . . Anyway, I’m much better now.’

One minute, her hostess looked as if she would crumble at a touch, and the next, when a maid knocked on the door to see if they needed anything, she was a model of brisk efficiency. ‘Keep calm and carry on!’ she’d concluded, with that brittle smile. ‘It’s what we do, isn’t it?’

From that moment, the Queen had understood the out-of-body experience of shock. She had experienced an echo of it herself, just listening to the story. Later, she had since wondered if that was what predators like that senior politician counted on. What a woman did in the moment, how a woman felt, was entirely unpredictable and personal. The horror made rational behaviour more unlikely than not. If only it was as easy as ‘putting a door between them’.

Moira had called Lee naive, but the Queen couldn’t help feeling that it was Moira whose naivety was showing. How fortunate she was that she didn’t know what she was talking about.

Moira was still floundering. The Queen decided to move the conversation on from Astrid. ‘Did Lee ever tell Valentine the story?’ she asked. ‘Or anyone else apart from you and Laura Wallace?’

Moira tugged on her vape again. ‘I wouldn’t know. She had no intention of doing so at the time. We never spoke of it again and it was because she didn’t want to. It was as if she’d put it in a locked box and thrown away the key. I suppose when she was dying she might have said something to Valentine, but I can’t think why she would.’

‘Isn’t there something important about knowing one’s ancestry?’ the Queen wondered. ‘Not titles, I mean, but whatever runs in the blood?’

‘In Valentine’s case, it was vital for him not to know. Think what was at stake! His identity, his heredity, his trust in his mother’s honour . . . everything. But he did give Ned a very odd look at the funeral. Something was going on between them. Ned seemed . . .’ Moira paused to think. ‘Amused. I remember he went over to Valentine and that boyfriend of his and was charm itself. I must say, I was very surprised when Ned got the invitation in the first place. Astrid said Ned was, too. He was very tickled about it. It made me wonder about Lee.’

‘Oh? In what way?’

‘Well, I’d always assumed that it was Lee who was trying to pull the St Cyr family together, but actually, given the rapprochement at her funeral, I wondered if she’d been the one keeping them apart.’

Chapter 28

The Queen had stayed longer than she intended. As the car whisked her back along the road, past old villages and modern caravan parks, she thought back to the ambassador’s wife and the senior politician. He had risen further in his country’s ranks and tried, more than once, to become an ambassador to the UK himself. It had even been suggested that he should be given an honorary knighthood – yet somehow, all his efforts were frustrated. Recommendations on his behalf would arrive in one of the boxes. For one reason or another, the answer was always an implacable no.

For years, the Queen had wondered why her hostess had felt able to share such private information. She certainly hadn’t asked for it, but perhaps the stress of preparing for a royal visit, on top of everything else, had given the poor woman the absolute need to talk to someone. ‘I know I can trust you,’ she had said in the only reference to the desperate moment the two of them had shared – and it was true. As monarch, one was used to keeping secrets; people told you things because they knew they would go no further. What had Moira said? ‘You . . . and the Pope.’ Friends and acquaintances, staff, too, shared the most extraordinary information. It was as if they thought of one’s private space as a confessional.

A minute later, the car drove past a square-towered gothic church, set back from the road. It soared impressively from its flat surroundings, probably built by the wealth of wool merchants in the fifteenth century, she thought. Philip would know. Once upon a time it would have been a Catholic place of worship, with elaborate stalls for formal confessions. When the Church of England took over, had it been a wrench or a relief for the local people to lose the priest as their essential connection to God’s forgiveness? she wondered. In her experience, people needed someone. If they couldn’t talk, their pain came out in other ways. She had seen so many fall apart.

And as the car drove on, she saw serried rows of wine bottles in her mind’s eye.

‘I’d like to visit the estate office before we go to Sandringham House,’ she said to Lady Caroline. ‘The car can come back for me. And can you let Mrs Maddox know I’ll be a little late for tea? There’s something I must do.’

The car paused outside the red-brick building while the Queen knocked on the estate office door. Once inside, passing several shocked staff, she asked Julian Cassidy if she could see him alone. Her unannounced arrival was unusual, but she sensed that he was more weary than surprised. She noticed the slackness of his tie, the saggy skin, the poorly ironed shirt, the unkempt hair that badly needed a cut, through which he was running a distracted hand. He reminded her a little of the foreign secretary on a bad day. He was a man with a lot on his mind.

Cassidy led her into his cosy office, with its old-fashioned furniture, its smell of dog, and its view of pine and birch trees.

‘Can I offer you a seat, ma’am?’ He indicated a sturdy Edwardian armchair, but the Queen refused. This would be a stand-up conversation.

‘Mrs Raspberry was knocked over a week before Christmas,’ she began. He said nothing and feigned confusion, but she saw the wariness that settled over him as he stood facing her. ‘Someone was speeding through Dersingham in the dark. It was just after a bend in the road. It’s not surprising, perhaps, that they didn’t see her, but they would have felt something.’ Cassidy was still as a statue. She wasn’t sure he was even breathing. ‘The impact must have caused damage to the car.’ She waited.

‘I imagine it must,’ he said eventually.

‘Whoever hit her had probably been drinking. That’s why he was going too fast, why he didn’t react in time, why he didn’t stop.’

He swallowed. ‘That may be true. I was asked about the accident because my own car was damaged two days later, actually.’

‘Helena Fisher was your witness, wasn’t she?’

‘Yes. She happened to be passing . . .’

‘Was she? And did she happen to be passing two days before, when you did indeed speed through Dersingham?’

Cassidy ran his hand through his hair again. His right eye was slightly bloodshot. She watched as he fought a look of rising panic. He reminded her of Arthur Raspberry for a moment. But she had far more sympathy for the teenager.

‘I don’t know what you mean, ma’am.’

‘I mean that Judy Raspberry deserves better than your conspiracy with your lover. It was one of the shortest days of the year. I don’t think you meant to hit her, but you were on your way home from a boozy lunch and it was already dark, you weren’t concentrating on the road, and the next thing you knew—’

‘I—’ He stared at her. There was a long silence that filled the stuffy room. He licked his dry lips. ‘I honestly thought it was a deer, escaped from the bog, or a badger. I didn’t see anything, but there was suddenly just this . . . thud. And a sort of paleness against the windscreen. I panicked. I slowed down and looked behind me and I couldn’t see anything in the road, and then I saw a dark shape and I thought perhaps it had been a badger after all.’

‘You didn’t stop,’ the Queen repeated, sharply.

‘I couldn’t.’ He flushed.

She saw how wretched he looked and added, ‘I think we’d better sit down after all.’

She took the armchair he had originally offered her, and he slumped into the heavy office chair beside the desk.

‘You seem to know about me and Helena,’ he said dully. ‘We’d arranged this night away. We tried to go somewhere nobody would see us. There’s this little place near Holkham . . . We drove back separately. I’d had a couple of glasses of Shiraz at lunch and I knew if the police breathalysed me I’d lose my licence, and this brand-new job I had here, which was everything I’d worked for, and . . . Everything was so good.’ He looked at the Queen with baleful, bloodhound eyes. ‘It was all so good,’ he repeated, ‘and I didn’t want to lose it all over a bloody badger.’

‘A badger.’ The Queen gave him an implacable stare. ‘And the next day? You must have found out by then what had really happened.’

He looked down and said nothing.

‘You could have gone to the police then. They were asking for witnesses.’

‘Yes.’ His eyes rose to meet hers eventually. ‘I could. But by then . . .’ He shrugged and looked defeated. ‘She was in hospital. There was nothing I could do.’

‘Judy Raspberry was not a badger, Mr Cassidy.’

‘I know that!’ His shame came out as a defensive bark. ‘But I made one mistake. I tried to cover it up, but . . . It’s happened and it’s ruined my life anyway. I can’t change anything.’ He shrugged again, helplessly. ‘Helena gave the witness statement. Now, she won’t talk to me.’

The Queen regarded him in silence for a while.

‘You seem to expect me to feel sorry for you.’ He flinched. She moved towards the door and paused. ‘I think you feel sorry enough for yourself. I can’t make you choose what to do, but I can tell you quite categorically, Mr Cassidy, that you can change something. You can be honest, and you can bring some sort of understanding to Mrs Raspberry’s friends and family. They may not forgive you – that’s up to them – but at least they’ll know what happened. They won’t have that endlessly gnawing pain of uncertainty. And you’ll pay a price for it, of course. The police will no doubt charge you with something. But is looking them in the eye and admitting what you’ve done any worse than what you’re living with now?’ She noticed that once again he couldn’t look her in the eye. His own were fixed on the carpet. ‘Think about it,’ she went on. ‘Let me know what you decide.’

He muttered something so incoherent she didn’t catch it.

‘What?’

‘I said, I suppose you need my resignation in the morning, ma’am.’

‘I need honesty, and trust, Mr Cassidy. I need a certain amount of moral courage. When you’ve decided what to do, we’ll talk again.’

She made her own way out of the office, leaving him standing in a daze.

It had been a very difficult afternoon. She hoped there was chocolate biscuit cake for tea.

Chapter 29

The following day was Sunday, which was designated for reflection. The Bishop of Guildford, who was visiting that weekend, gave what was no doubt an excellent sermon, but the Queen’s thoughts were elsewhere and she caught one sentence in ten. Fortunately, Philip would no doubt give a summary of its salient points over sherry before lunch. She would simply have to nod in agreement.

With two weeks to go until she returned to London, the Queen was keenly aware of time passing. She knew more clearly than ever what must have happened to Ned, and why. But she didn’t have a scrap of hard evidence. It still wasn’t enough to take to the chief constable. Or was it? As always with such cases, she was very keen to solve it, and equally keen not to be seen to do the police’s job for them. It was a difficult tightrope to walk.

After lunch, she joined the small shooting party who were going out after partridge. The sky was full of thick, grey cloud, promising more snow and lending an eerie light to the afternoon. She was surrounded by friends and dogs, which was delightful, but they found her much more quiet than usual. Philip asked if she was sickening for something again, but it wasn’t that. She was thinking over what she did and didn’t know, and of what she was and wasn’t certain – which were not exactly the same thing.

There was an edge to the house party this weekend, which included a couple of political grandees. It wasn’t only the Queen who was preoccupied. The new president of the United States had decided to launch the tone of his presidency by denying media reports of the size of the crowd at his inauguration. The Queen thought of the crowds that assembled in the Mall in front of Buckingham Palace on big occasions, and was silently grateful. Sir Simon was despairing. He was not a fan of a leadership style that involved bringing basic truths into question, and the prime minister was lining up to meet him at the end of the week.

Meanwhile Philip was edgy, too. This was their last stay at Sandringham during which he was in charge of the estate, as he had been for sixty-five years. Next year, Charles would no doubt be showing off his own new leadership style. She had every confidence in their son, and so did Philip, really, but relinquishing control was not his strong suit. The mood would pass. She would weather it. She was good at weathering things.

In the morning, she was the first person to come downstairs, which was unusual. She felt a great restlessness, and knew the best way to resolve it. Willow, Candy and Vulcan were duly assembled in front of the house. Scarf on head, she took them for a walk to the church and back, echoing the one she had taken yesterday. Gradually, as she knew they would, the last few details of the St Cyr case that had been bothering her slotted into place. There was one outstanding issue, but it wasn’t insurmountable. The trouble was, it was all conjecture.

Could a Sovereign of the Realm accuse a member of the nobility of murder, with no concrete evidence at all, on the basis of one passing remark made over coffee? She thought not. Mr Bloomfield and his team of twenty-first-century technicians would get there on their own, surely? With one exception as to motive, they had access to the same information she did. She just needed to be patient.

But the Queen was not patient when it came to the certain knowledge that someone in her circle was a killer who was surprisingly adept at getting away with it. In a way, it was almost admirable, but she kept thinking of the sea, and how it had claimed Chris Wallace. How long could justice wait?

The week began promisingly: DNA tests confirmed the relationship between Ned and Valentine St Cyr. Surely an arrest was imminent? Instead, Rozie reported that Valentine was free again and no further action was planned. The Queen was not a panicker, but this was alarming. If anything, they were going backwards, for goodness’ sake.

On Friday, she and Philip made an official visit to the University of East Anglia. The chief constable himself was there, so she took the opportunity to ask him how they were getting on, and to her huge frustration, he seemed as stumped as he had been in December, and much less sanguine about finding a solution soon.

‘Valentine St Cyr admitted he suspected Edward was his father,’ Bloomfield told her, during a brief lull in the reception. ‘That’s what they’d been talking about in their little meetings, of course. He doesn’t want it made public yet, until he’s talked to Lord Mundy about it. And you, I imagine, ma’am. It’s quite explosive for his family, him not being the next baron, et cetera.’

‘Isn’t that a motive?’ the Queen asked, surprised that he seemed so phlegmatic about it.

‘Absolutely, ma’am. But St Cyr has challenged us to find concrete evidence. He has a nice team of expensive lawyers. Given what happened last time . . . ahem.’

‘Yes, I see what you mean.’

‘His explanation about scattering his mother’s ashes at sea was supported by several sources,’ Bloomfield said. ‘We did wonder if he was in cahoots with his sister, but if so, they managed it without leaving a trail. We’ve searched his flat, and that of his partner, and all vehicles they have access to. There are no signs of suspicious cleaning, and not a scrap of Edward’s DNA anywhere, except on a suit jacket of Valentine’s that he claimed to have been wearing when he met up with his father. Nor was any of his DNA at Edward’s flat.’ He smiled at her. ‘You must be relieved, ma’am.’

‘Oh?’

‘Because Mr St Cyr is a friend.’

‘Ah. I see what you mean.’

Philip was staring daggers at them from across the lobby of the university. She had been talking too long. ‘Did you wonder about the dogs?’ she asked, before saying goodbye.

‘The dogs, ma’am?’

‘Yes. Being left alone at Abbottswood.’

‘Oh, those dogs! Yes, we did. The suspiciousness of the damage they did, you mean, left to their own devices. Don’t worry, we looked into it. It was all above board.’

‘And now I must go. Thank you, Chief Constable.’

She smiled and kept her frustrations to herself.

Back at Sandringham, the news bulletins featured images of the prime minister at the White House, standing next to the new president. The very first thing she mentioned was the state visit to London, ‘as soon as possible’. The Queen felt once again as if she was being dangled, like a treat.

She couldn’t affect what was happening in Washington at the moment, but surely she could make some progress in north Norfolk? She had ten days left and she sensed the chief constable needed as much help as she could provide, ideally without ever knowing she had given it. It was time to talk to Rozie.

They met in the Queen’s office that evening, while the others dressed for dinner. Rozie was ostensibly giving the Boss a detailed debrief on the prime minister’s Washington visit. It might seem unnecessarily long for something one could simply watch on the news, but a handy thing about being the monarch was that one was rarely questioned about one’s need for information on international events.

‘I want you to talk to the vicar of St Agnes at Ladybridge,’ the Queen said instead. ‘You might suggest that I have a friend who is likely to be in his congregation on Sunday and would appreciate the sermon on truth and beauty that he gave when he came to West Newton.’

‘Truth and beauty, ma’am.’ Rozie nodded. She got out her personal notebook, which was disguised to look like bad poetry and song lyrics, should anyone happen to pick it up. Its key pages contained the essentials from the police reports, and the additional information she, Katie and the Queen had found. She made a new note. ‘I assume there’s someone in particular who needs to hear it.’

‘There most certainly is. There has been an inordinate amount of lying,’ the Queen said. ‘To one’s face, by people who are dear to one, which is quite disturbing. One person has been lying consistently, although I doubt the vicar will have any effect on them. Perhaps they assumed I wouldn’t notice. But as my loft manager says, “people talk”. One tends to spot inconsistencies eventually. And then, there are the dogs.’

‘The dogs, ma’am?’

‘But first there’s the question of Valentine. I wondered at first if the problem was something he’d done, but now we know it’s simply who he is.’

Rozie thought at first that the Boss was referring to his sexuality. This was not a ‘problem’, surely? She was wondering how to disapprove respectfully when the Queen went on:

‘Moira Westover suggested he first got a hint of it at Lee Mundy’s funeral. It must have been quite a shock.’

‘Oh, you mean his paternity. Do you think that’s when Ned told him that he was his father?’ Rozie asked.

‘Actually I don’t. I think Ned was more than happy for it to remain a secret. It suited his purposes well. But Valentine worked it out. Perhaps it was a look Ned gave him, or a gesture they had in common. Anyway, he was right.’

‘You’d think, if you discovered someone was your parent, you’d want to connect, but maybe Valentine resented him,’ Rozie said. ‘It means he knows he’s not the real heir to the St Cyr title. Could someone kill over that? A title?’

‘Certainly,’ the Queen agreed, without hesitation. ‘There are many things men have done through history for a title. Women, too, of course.’

‘So you think he’s the killer?’ Rozie asked.

The Queen’s gaze was steady and unblinking. ‘No.’

Rozie thought the Boss might be avoiding a delicate issue.

‘I know it’s all circumstantial evidence at the moment,’ she argued. ‘But the circumstances add up, ma’am. They know he had the opportunity, if he worked with his fiancé. We know he had a motive. Surely the police do, too?’

‘And yet . . . there’s nothing to connect him to the murder.’ The Queen explained what the chief constable had told her about the lack of DNA evidence. ‘DNA gives, and it takes away.’

Rozie pursed her lips and frowned.

‘I know you don’t want to believe it, ma’am.’ She was hesitant. Accusing the Boss of wishful thinking was a bold move. But she felt she had to, despite the arch look the Queen was giving her. ‘I realise you’ve known him all his life, but—’

‘It isn’t that,’ the Queen said. ‘Quite the reverse. But thank you for challenging my argument. It’s what I want you to do. Sometimes I feel too close to this case. I need you to mark my homework.’

‘Oh. OK,’ Rozie said, unable to hide her surprise. This was a new development. Arguing with the Boss might take some getting used to. But if it helped . . .

The Queen invited Rozie to sit down with her, to facilitate conversation and avoid straining her neck. ‘It starts with genetics,’ she said. ‘I, of all people, should understand that better than anyone. An obsession with genetics caused the original crime, but it was love that caused the next one. And carelessness that caused the third.’

‘The third?’ Rozie asked. ‘Do you mean Mrs Raspberry?’

‘No. Although you’re right,’ the Queen acknowledged, ‘it was pure carelessness that caused poor Mrs Raspberry to be knocked over. And a cruel disregard for her life that caused her to be left there. I’ve spoken to Mr Cassidy about it.’

‘You have?’

‘We’ll see what he does. It’s quite obvious that he’s been suffering ever since. Not enough to pay the proper price, however. Not yet, at least.’ The Queen fiddled absently with the arm of her bifocals again. ‘But that was an accident. Nothing surrounding Ned’s death was entirely accidental, by contrast. In fact, it was all meticulously planned. The third victim I’m referring to was Mr Wallace. His death was awful and avoidable. He was only supposed to be distracted, but to drive a man to such despair . . .’

Rozie was losing track. ‘Then who is the second victim, ma’am? I thought he was.’

‘No. The second victim is Ned himself.’

Rozie frowned. ‘Then who’s the first?’

‘Lady Mundy, who died in the summer. But I’m referring to long ago. You might say, Valentine, too. His life was always going to be extremely complicated, through no fault of his own. And I’m sorry to say my friend Georgina was partly responsible. She bred a terrible sense of entitlement into her son. Ned took it out on Lee. I won’t go into details, but Ned used Lee to try and sneak his bloodline back into the barons of Ladybridge. It was a deliberate act. The odds of it working were incredibly slim, and yet, it did. The secret was very well kept until Lee died. Then Ned met the family again and it all started to go wrong.

‘And here we come to the first inconsistency. The St Cyrs told me quite clearly that Ned had offered to go to the funeral. Hugh was very gracious about it. And yet, Astrid Westover and her mother both said how surprised Ned had been to be invited. Did he offer, or was he asked?’

Rozie checked her notes. ‘The police certainly thought that Ned was the first one to try and end the feud.’

‘Mmm, but I disagree,’ the Queen said. ‘Astrid suggested that he was pleased to rebuild his relationships with his family. But, under the circumstances, I doubt very much that he would have made that offer unprompted. I think he was drawn back into Ladybridge’s orbit. Somebody wanted him there. My husband was right.’

‘Yes, ma’am?’

‘He said from the very beginning, it’s always the family.’

‘So it is one of the St Cyrs, ma’am?’

‘Of course it is. The trouble with Mr Bloomfield is that he and his investigating team have access to endless modern technology. It’s all terribly impressive, but this is an old-fashioned crime of passion. It’s the human element they needed to focus on. And the canine element, one might say. As I say, I have no proof, and everyone has alibis, but once you think about the dogs, it’s obvious how it was done.’

It wasn’t obvious to Rozie. ‘You mentioned the dogs, ma’am?’

The Queen looked slightly irritated. ‘I’m surprised more people haven’t noticed. They caused havoc at Abbottswood, because they weren’t looked after properly.’

‘I did wonder about the damage,’ Rozie said. ‘So did the police.’

‘That’s not what I mean. The chief constable sought to reassure me that it was all above board. I assume he meant it really was the dogs who ripped up the sitting room, not some sort of intruder. I don’t disagree about that. If you leave an unhappy dog for long enough, there’s no end to the damage he can do. The thing is, they hadn’t been fed or exercised since the day before. That’s what’s so interesting. Ned hadn’t checked the cleaning lady would be there to do it. Nobody leaves their precious dogs for such a long time without being certain they’re being cared for.’

‘I’m sure some people do, ma’am.’

‘Not if you love them. Ned was a dog person, like Georgina. He always adored my dogs. He’d have played with them more than Charles if he’d been allowed. No, he wouldn’t leave home without being confident that they would be let out and fed in the morning. If the cleaning lady wasn’t coming in, he would have found someone else. I simply couldn’t imagine Ned being so inconsiderate. And once you can’t imagine that . . .’

Rozie began to enjoy this idea of disagreeing with the Boss. She could easily imagine it. ‘He was under a lot of pressure, ma’am. That might have caused the lapse in concentration.’

‘We don’t know for certain that he was,’ the Queen insisted. ‘According to Astrid, Ned was very “Zen”, or something of that nature. The police have assumed he was under pressure because he was acting oddly. I think the oddness of his activity is the interesting part. Take the speeding car. He conveniently broke the speed limit twice in his Maserati. It meant the speed cameras caught him. This was despite the fact that Astrid said he couldn’t afford to lose his licence. It was all very theatrical. Then there was the “RIP” written in the desk diary at Abbottswood. I’m sure it was “RIP”, not “RLP”, by the way. It was a joke, another flourish. All it did was highlight that Ned was at home in Norfolk when he wrote it in.’

Rozie seriously wondered if the Queen was having a senior moment. ‘But surely the plan was to draw attention to London, ma’am, not Norfolk?’

‘Later, yes. First, there was the phone call. Julian Cassidy told you that what Ned said to him didn’t make sense.’

‘That’s right. Something about raining in hell.’

‘It’s not “raining in hell”, it’s “reigning in hell”. My sort of reigning. “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.” It’s from Paradise Lost. I had to study it as a girl. Anyway, here was a man calling someone he didn’t know very well, talking about a fall from grace, for no obvious reason.’

Here was something Rozie could connect to. There was a lot of talk about falling from grace at church when she was growing up. With a mother called Grace, she had both taken it personally and never quite made sense of it.

‘Ned doesn’t strike me as the sort of man who would worry about the state of his soul,’ she suggested.

The Queen nodded. ‘Indeed not. I think he worried about the state of his estate. But it wasn’t Ned who abandoned his dogs or drove to London, or quoted Milton at Mr Cassidy. The call was made simply to show that he was at Abbottswood, when he was not. He was already dead by then.’

‘Ma’am?’

The Queen put down her glasses.

‘At least, I hope he was.’

Chapter 30

Rozie rapidly reviewed what she thought she knew about Ned’s last hours.

‘But he was seen by witnesses in London, ma’am.’

‘A tall man in a distinctive hat and scarf was seen,’ The Queen corrected her. ‘Haven’t you noticed how the St Cyr men look alike?’

Rozie had. ‘But what about the texts he sent to Astrid? She’d have known if it wasn’t her fiancé sending them.’

The Queen gave her a gimlet stare.

‘Would she?’

It sounded like a rhetorical question, but Rozie stood her ground. ‘If it was someone else using his phone, they did a very good job, ma’am. Astrid mentioned that the texts were quite intimate.’ She didn’t want to embarrass the Boss, but modern sexting between couples could be pretty explicit. It was if it was any good, anyway. Although . . .

‘Mmm?’ the Queen murmured, seeing Rozie hesitate.

‘I suppose if you had access to the text history, you could recreate the style. You’d just have to scroll up.’ It might not be so hard after all. Not for one conversation, at least. Creepy, but not difficult.

‘So we can’t be certain it was Ned who texted Astrid that evening.’

But someone did. And they did it from Ned’s phone, in his studio. Rozie consulted her notes.

‘I don’t see who. According to Valentine, both he and Roland Peng were in his studio at the time. Lord Mundy, Flora and her daughters were at the hall. They’re all witnesses for each other. Then Lord Mundy had the late-night meeting with Mr Wallace. Flora saw him arrive.’

The Queen nodded to herself. ‘Mr Wallace is not here either to confirm or deny that story. A car arrived at the hall, certainly. It might have been a taxi from the station, however. I think where the St Cyrs are concerned, we must assume that everyone is prepared to lie for the sake of protecting the family, really. The thing is, who saw or spoke to Ned after they did?’

Rozie thought it through. It seemed unlikely, but it made sense. The problem had always been how Ned managed to disappear in London. If he never went there, a lot of questions answered themselves. And it made more sense of the location of the hand. She put her notebook down.

‘There’s two things I don’t get.’

‘Oh?’

‘If it wasn’t Ned, why haven’t the police worked this out? Wouldn’t DNA and fingerprints prove what really happened?’

‘You would have thought so,’ the Queen said with a brief sigh. ‘It’s why I’ve spent so long wondering if I might be wrong. If I’m right, whoever did this was very careful and very clever. I imagine they watched a lot of crime scene programmes. They’re fascinating. And the police didn’t think about the dogs. What was your other question?’

‘How did Ned die?’

‘In the most old-fashioned way possible. He was poisoned, I imagine.’

Rozie nodded. Of course. In the true St Cyr tradition.

‘The thing about poison is it’s difficult to use if you want it to be untraceable,’ the Queen said. ‘I’ve read enough detective novels to know that much. If you don’t intend the body ever to be found intact, it’s much easier. Then he was hidden away, stripped of his distinctive clothes, his phone, his keys. The killer could return later, to dispose of the body at their leisure. The important thing was to create a distraction for the next few hours.’

‘So when Flora said she saw Ned drive her father away from Ladybridge . . .’

‘She saw someone in Ned’s car, in his distinctive coat and hat. Or else she was lying.’

Rozie tried to imagine the sheer audaciousness of it. She hadn’t associated the St Cyr family with bravura. Eccentricity yes, but . . . On the other hand, was there anything you could put past the aristocracy? Even so . . .

‘If you’re right, ma’am, and the killer took on Mr St Cyr’s identity, they could have been caught out in his Land Rover, his car, his house, his flat. The risk . . . So many things could have gone wrong.’

‘It was a risk worth taking, apparently,’ the Queen said. “Better to reign in hell.” Perhaps things did go wrong. But here we are: the police still don’t know where to find the body. Without it, they have nothing. And of course, if they had it, it would explain everything.’

‘Do you know where it is, ma’am?’

‘I think so. There’s only one logical place it can be.’

‘I . . . I still can’t really believe it. It’s hard to imagine . . .’

‘That was the idea.’

‘But yes, I see what you mean,’ Rozie said. ‘If you’re right, I’d know where I’d look.’

‘Good. Now I just have to persuade the chief constable to look there, too.’

Chapter 31

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. They’re saying we’re a hotbed of drugs now.’

‘Good morning.’

The Queen made herself comfortable opposite her husband in the saloon and accepted the offer of coffee from her page. Philip looked up from the Recorder and grunted back.

‘May I see?’ she asked.

He handed her the paper with a flick of the wrist. ‘Bastards. Every one of ’em. The drivel they’re paid to write.’

The Queen studied the article in question.

The piece was surprisingly accurate. It described the money-laundering scheme, pointed out that the clubs in question tended to be in the west of the country, and suggested that she had expressed concern about her own doorstep, in the east. It then went on to describe the royal loft and its management in glowing terms.

Only three people that she could think of knew, or might guess, that she was personally concerned. She hadn’t mentioned the issue to anyone else. Those three were Mr Day, her loft manager, his wife, and Roland Peng, who had told her about it in the first place.

Fortunately, the article didn’t mention why she was interested. Her thinking had moved on now, anyway. But it did potentially solve a little problem.

Rozie was up to her neck in ice-cold water. The breath had been squeezed out of her body and everything tingled and hurt. And yet, it was life-affirming. How had she lived this long and not known how essential and fabulous wild swimming was? She was building up to a minute in the water. Around her, an assortment of swimming hats bobbed confidently in the sea.

Katie watched from the safety of the beach. She had resisted saying ‘I told you so’ when Rozie came back from her first wild swim, brimming with enthusiasm. Instead, she had introduced her to her own wild swimming group, based up the coast. She could see this was the start of a beautiful relationship: Captain Oshodi and cold water. On their way back, they spotted the Queen driving out to Wolferton.

‘D’you know where she’s going?’ Katie asked.

‘Wood Farm, probably,’ Rozie suggested. ‘She usually is.’

But she wasn’t.

The Queen had a very pleasant tour of the pigeon loft from Mr Day. Afterwards, he and his wife entertained her to coffee and home-made chocolate cake. They gave her some gin to take home and try after they had all regretfully concluded that it was a bit early to crack it open now, at 10 a.m. And the Queen was driving, after all.

‘Isn’t it good news about Lord Mundy’s son?’ Mrs Day said. ‘We were talking about it this morning. You must be pleased, personally, ma’am. You know him, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do.’ The Queen was relieved. They had indulged in several topics of conversation leading up to this one, but at last they were here.

‘Did you ever think he could be a murderer?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ the Queen said, not entirely truthfully.

‘There isn’t any hope that Mr St Cyr’s still alive, is there?’ Mr Day asked.

‘None, I’m afraid.’

‘I can’t help picturing him in a shallow grave somewhere,’ Mrs Day added solemnly.

‘It’s dreadful when there isn’t a body, isn’t it?’ the Queen suggested. ‘Everyone is left with so much uncertainty. The family can’t move on in so many practical ways.’

‘It’s nasty,’ Mrs Day said. ‘Sadistic, I’d say. To kill someone is something, but to hide the body . . . that somehow makes it worse, don’t you think?’

‘I do.’

‘There’s no burial, no peace. It’s un-Christian. I suppose if you’re a murderer you don’t care about things like that.’

‘I suppose not,’ the Queen agreed. ‘Although no doubt you’ve heard the rumour.’

Mrs Day sat up straighter. ‘What rumour’s that, ma’am?’

‘The one that says he never did go up to London.’

‘No! Who said that?’

‘I can’t remember where I heard it.’ The Queen looked vague. ‘Sandringham is a fount of gossip. But someone said they knew for a fact the person who left Abbottswood that day in his car wasn’t him.’

‘Goodness! Who was it?’

The Queen shrugged. ‘I can’t imagine, can you?’

‘Do the police know?’

‘I’m not sure,’ the Queen said, innocently.

‘You know what they think of gossip, pet,’ Mr Day said to his wife. ‘The way they treated poor Judy.’

‘True.’ Mrs Day rolled her eyes. She frowned with concentration, trying to remember Ned’s last movements, based on what they’d heard. ‘It could’ve been a parcel delivery man who saw the car. Fred Sayle supplies heating oil. He could’ve spotted someone driving out as he was going in . . .’

‘Perhaps they felt they wouldn’t be believed,’ the Queen said. ‘Or they didn’t trust their own judgement. I wish one knew more, so one could do something about it.’

‘I suppose you could tell the police, ma’am.’

The Queen gave a perfectly honest reply. ‘Without any evidence, I don’t think I could help.’

‘Mmm.’

Mrs Day was still thinking hard. The Queen decided that this was a good time to leave her to it. One useful thing about being the monarch – something that was often as much of a burden as a gift – was that every little thing you said was weighed and measured. She would be astonished if there were no ripples from the pebble she had cast into this particular pond.

‘It’s a difficult issue, isn’t it? If you discuss it with anyone, please don’t mention me. I don’t approve of gossip.’

‘Ooh, I wouldn’t dream of it, ma’am,’ Mrs Day said reverently.