Murder Most Royal

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?’

‘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.’

‘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.’

‘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 . . .’

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.