Murder Most Royal

She put it down to the champagne, and possibly the Zaza cocktail. She could barely open her eyes.

Her eyes shot open. The dull morning light was blinding.

She sat up sharply, before woozily collapsing back into her pillows.

Eventually, after a large breakfast and a short walk for the children to burn off some energy after their stocking-opening shenanigans, the rest of the family disappeared for a blissfully quiet couple of hours to go to church and talk to the crowds. If it had been possible for the Queen to feel more dreadful than she did at the thought of letting down the visitors at the gate, who had been waiting for hours in sub-zero temperatures to see her, she would have done so, but instead she took her time getting ready, accompanied by her dresser and the sound of carols on the radio.

Later, the rector arrived to give her private communion – there were advantages to being head of the Church of England – and everyone reconvened in the dining room for a meal of roast turkey, seven types of organic vegetable from various royal farms and gardens, a flaming Christmas pudding and, for those with the stomach for it, plenty of fine wine and champagne. There were party crowns and, by tradition, the Queen was the only one who didn’t wear one. As a girl, she had found it so very funny when her father didn’t and everyone else did. They finished just in time to gather round the television set in the saloon at three, to watch the message she had recorded earlier at Buckingham Palace.

‘I looked perfectly well then,’ she said, observing herself from her vantage point on the nearest sofa.

‘That was before the little Petri dishes got going. Which one of you buggers was it?’ Philip demanded, glancing round.

‘You look lovely now,’ Sophie said gamely. You could always rely on Sophie to say the right thing, even if in the teeth of the evidence.

Familiar with what she was going to say to the nation and the Commonwealth, the Queen let her gaze drift from the television to a small gap in the panelling, marking the hidden door. The room where she had spoken to the chief constable was the one where her father and grandfather used to record their Christmas messages for the radio. They were broadcast live to an empire that seemed to power the world. How quickly that idea had become history, and both her life and her father’s had been spent managing the transition.

For a moment, she pictured him beside her again, his hand reassuringly on her shoulder. These feelings didn’t completely fade, even after so many decades. He had died in his bedroom upstairs, aged only fifty-six, and she had been far away, in Africa. Halfway across the world.

‘Mummy, are you all right?’ Anne asked.

‘It’s just this dreadful flu. Pass me my handbag and I’ll find a handkerchief.’

‘One thing you can be sure of,’ Mrs Maddox said to a select audience in the housekeeper’s sitting room a few hours later, ‘it wasn’t one of the family.’

‘What? A prince, you mean?’ one of the butlers asked, to brief sniggering, quickly shushed.

This evening, the housekeeper was holding court with the household staff while the royals, for a brief moment, looked after themselves. Rozie, who had spent the day missing the spice and flavour of her mother’s cooking in her family’s flat in West London, and the equal spice of her cousins’ friendly, bickering conversation around the table, was grateful to be asked along. Technically, she was too senior to join the ‘downstairs’ staff, but at Sandringham such distinctions seemed to shift like the tides.

‘Why’s that, then?’ the butler asked.

‘Because,’ the man sitting beside Rozie said, ‘if you want to inherit, you need a body.’ This was Rick Jackson, one of the Queen’s long-standing protection officers and chief inspector at the Met. ‘Or you have to wait seven years before you can declare the man dead.’

‘So where d’you think it is then?’ a lady’s maid wondered.

‘Me personally?’ Jackson queried. ‘Limed. In a quarry somewhere. I think the hand was a trophy. Then they got scared they had it, so they threw it away. Or they got told to. There are a million better ways of doing it, though.’

‘Surely not?’ Mrs Maddox interjected. ‘Mr St Cyr was hardly some sort of gangster. If you go back enough generations, I think he’s related to the Queen.’

‘That’s hasn’t stopped anyone before,’ Jackson pointed out. ‘In some periods of history, it was a motive.’

‘It needn’t have been for the inheritance, mind you,’ Rozie mused, returning to the original point. ‘There are other reasons for killing a relative.’

‘True,’ Mrs Maddox agreed. ‘But I can’t see why anyone would want to in this case.’

‘Three bitter divorces,’ the lady’s maid pointed out.

‘Yes, but the last one was twenty years ago,’ Mrs Maddox observed. ‘Poor man. He was unlucky in love.