Murder Most Royal

They were really so close to each other in what they loved and cared about, if only they knew.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rozie consulted her notes.

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

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

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

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

‘No, ma’am. Only that they were catching up on family news. There’s nothing to link him to the disappearance, but his alibi is patchy.