Murder Most Royal

Some of the romance had been sacrificed to make what was left accessible. The Queen nodded to herself. It was a sign of survival.

The car swept across the drawbridge and into the cobbled courtyard of the main house, where three generations of St Cyrs had come out to greet them, accompanied by an assortment of spaniels, terriers and an elderly Labrador.

The baron looked as old and hunched as he had been at Christmas. He had not dressed up for her visit. Hugh’s normal style, which bordered on affectation, was a patched tweed jacket, a flannel shirt and cord trousers held up with baling twine. The Queen suspected he had seen himself as a rural character from a P. G. Wodehouse novel at some point in his more sprightly middle age, and stuck with it. Several other Norfolk landowners she knew were of similar mind, but the baling twine edged it, in her opinion.

Flora stood beside him, along with her three pretty, teenage daughters, who had not accompanied their mother to Sandringham. Their father, like Ned’s, was no longer in the picture. Somehow, men who were not St Cyrs by blood didn’t survive Ladybridge very long. Flora wore a neat jumper over a thick skirt that suggested the heating at the hall was not up to the quality of its gardens. It was impossible to tell whether the girls had made an effort. All their clothes were ripped or half-missing or very old and creased. It might be the first thing they’d pulled out of the wardrobe, but the Queen sensed it might equally be the height of fashion for their age.

‘Dad’s laid on lunch,’ Flora said, ‘but afterwards I want to show you the gardens. I know how much your mother loved them.’

‘What sort of mood was he in when you saw him?’ Lady Caroline asked. ‘Did you have any sense he was in trouble?’

The Queen was really very grateful for Lady Caroline.

‘I thought he seemed rather grim,’ Hugh said. ‘But perhaps that’s because he knew he’d be asking me for money over coffee.’

‘So you know her?’ the Queen asked.

‘I was at Pony Club with her eldest sister. I thought she was crazy to be marrying a man twice her age, until I saw them together at Abbottswood. I think it would have worked, actually.’

‘I know what you mean,’ the Queen agreed. ‘Not that I did see them together, exactly.’

‘The wedding would’ve been in three weeks,’ Eden, the youngest girl, piped up morosely.

‘Oh, dear. I suppose so,’ Lady Caroline agreed.

‘Ned invited us. He said now the family were back together, it was kind of important. I had this incredible Burberry dress I was going to wear . . .’

‘Figgy!’ her eldest sister Emerald said warningly.

‘What? It was a really nice dress.’

‘This was the exact last place we saw him,’ Emerald said. ‘In this room. He sat right where you’re sitting now, ma’am.’

‘Goodness,’ the Queen said. ‘How alarming. It must have been very awkward for you when the police came, asking questions.’

‘They were here for ages,’ Eden said. ‘They wanted to see all the weapons in the armoury passage. They asked loads of questions. By the end I was starting to think I’d done it myself.’

‘They wanted to know about our alibis the next day,’ Elinor, the middle girl, explained. ‘I didn’t really have one. I was out on a hack on Skylark most of the day. I’m sure I’d have had time to dash up to London by train and do something terrible.’

‘No, you wouldn’t,’ Emerald said, with a curled lip. ‘That train takes forever. You couldn’t even have driven it.’

‘You can’t get out of second gear.’

‘I could if I had an automatic,’ Elinor grumbled. She appealed to the Queen. ‘They only let me drive the 2CV, which is literally fifty years old and squeaks if you go over twenty miles an hour. And it’s broken right now. But I bet if I had a sports car I could have—’

‘Elinor did not kill our cousin,’ Flora assured the Queen briskly. ‘She hardly knew the man.’

‘And what about the rest of you?’ the Queen asked, with a hint of a smile to suggest she was joking, which she wasn’t.

‘I still wasn’t back from my ride,’ Elinor said sullenly. Nobody seemed interested.

‘I don’t remember where I was,’ Lord Mundy said.

‘Yes, you do, Dad,’ Flora reminded him. ‘You went for tea with Mrs Capelton.’

‘No, that was the day before. Ned dropped me off after lunch. She’s in charge of making the new kneelers for St Agnes in memory of Lee. She’s a wonderful woman but it took me two and a half hours to get away. I had to walk home in the dark.’

‘Who visited you that night, Grandpa?’ Elinor asked. ‘I saw the taxi in the courtyard.’

‘That I do remember. It was poor Mr Wallace. He was in a very fragile state. I tried to reassure him, but I’m not sure how effective I was.’

‘He did look grim,’ Flora agreed.