Murder Most Royal

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.’

‘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.

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’.