Murder Most Royal

You do it so beautifully.’

‘Flora’s doing a magnificent job,’ her father said. ‘In fact, Lee and I talked about letting her inherit Ladybridge when the time comes.’

‘That’s rather what we thought.’

No, the Queen couldn’t.

‘I can’t stop thinking about it,’ Flora went on. ‘He must have been high on drugs or something. And we’re actually related. It’s quite terrifying, really. You do wonder if such things are genetic, don’t you? You just can’t help it. We saw Ned just before he disappeared and you’d think he had another twenty years in him.’ She looked at the royal couple shrewdly. ‘Or thirty.’

‘You saw him recently?’ the Queen asked.

‘We met up a few times. We were just starting to mend fences. Not literally. Ned and broken fences seemed to be a bit of a theme lately. We had lunch the day before he vanished. The police were horribly suspicious. A couple of them came round, took one look at the armoury in the hall and asked us a thousand questions. They seem to think we might have grabbed a halberd from one of the walls, dashed up to London and—’

‘Were you aware of the recent pigeon club scandal, ma’am?’

The Queen, who had become absorbed by this sudden talk of Ned’s last known movements, was shocked to find Roland Peng standing in front of her again, leading her gently but firmly away from the others.

Anyway, it was too late. Roland had her cornered now, and told her a long and involved story, told to him by his grandfather in Singapore, about drug gangs in the UK who bought their way into pigeon racing clubs so they could use the sale of prize pigeons for nefarious money-laundering purposes. Roland wondered if the practice had yet reached Norfolk. She assured him it hadn’t. The fellow pigeon fanciers she encountered in East Anglia were some of the most straightforward people she knew. By the time she had reassured him not to worry, Hugh St Cyr was talking about the future of British farming in the wake of the loss of EU subsidies, and the conversation had moved on.

When the front door was shut behind them, Charles came to join his mother in the saloon. ‘Well, that went better than I feared. Poor Hugh, though. He looked practically at death’s door.’ And, as if prompted by that thought: ‘You’re not too exhausted, are you, Mummy?’

‘No, I can just about stand, thank you,’ she told him drily. ‘So tell me, what was Flora saying about Ned’s visit? I was distracted by pigeons.’

The Queen nodded. She still wasn’t so sure.

Her suspicions proved correct. When Rozie arrived in the office with the boxes the following morning, she announced that Jack Lions had been released. Perhaps ‘parking nearby’ had not been enough of a reason to detain him. Given his relationship to the victim, the Queen was relieved. She saw this as a positive development, although no doubt Bloomfield and his team would be disappointed.

However, as they were preparing to entertain their guests in the ballroom for New Year’s Eve, Rozie updated the royal couple with some worrying information.

‘Mine? Why?’ the Queen wondered.

‘They wouldn’t say. They were only informing us as a matter of courtesy.’

‘Do you have any idea what it might be?’

Rozie had just had a short and difficult conversation with the chief constable, who in turn had just had a short and difficult conversation with his team at the major crimes unit HQ. Both were sorry. It was maddening that the Queen had been landed in it like this, with no warning at all.

‘Er, yes, ma’am. It was provided by a Met officer who was working undercover with a group of animal rights activists. He recognised Mr Lions from a news item about the arrest. It turned out he was at a meeting in North London all day, to coordinate a campaign against a couple of medical laboratories. The Met officer saw him there in person. CCTV footage confirmed it, and once they presented him with the evidence, he admitted it straightaway.’

‘Why not say so before?’ Prince Philip wondered. ‘Surely planning to attack a laboratory is better than being accused of chopping up your own father?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Rozie agreed. ‘They thought Lions seemed to be spinning out his detention deliberately. Apparently, he had a huge smile on his face when he made his admission. As if he had scored some sort of point.’

‘What sort of point?’

Rozie shook her head. ‘I asked, and they don’t know.’

The Queen pursed her lips. ‘Given what he was really doing, I think I have an inkling.’

She sighed and hoped it wouldn’t be as bad as she thought.

Nobody dared read the tabloid in question too ostentatiously in the morning, but surreptitiously, it was snatched up and perused by everyone in the house.

‘The bastard!’ Philip said, the first to voice his opinion. ‘The absolute bastard.’

‘It had nothing to do with you!’ Sophie Wessex complained to the Queen, affronted on her behalf.