Murder Most Royal

‘What did you think?’ Mary asked, slipping into her own towel, which had sleeves and became a warm, puffy coat when she put it on.

‘Bloody brilliant,’ Rozie yelled. ‘Why doesn’t everyone do this?’

‘I know!’ Mary agreed. ‘Sometimes it takes a few more sessions but I’m glad you’re a convert. Coffee? We usually go back to my place before we go our separate ways.’

Being very cold had – to Rozie’s great surprise – been very good, but being warmly dressed in a cashmere sweater and jeans, drinking very good coffee around Mary’s pine kitchen table was fantastic.

‘Oh, yes,’ Alan said with a broad smile when Rozie pointed it out. ‘Everyone thinks we do it for the freezing sea, but we do it for the buzz on the jetty afterwards. And this. We’re not masochists.’

‘Not much,’ said the woman sitting next to him at the table. Her name was Renée, aged about sixty, Rozie guessed, and a ‘new girl’ on the estate, meaning she had only arrived eleven years ago. She specialised in white and dove-grey furniture for the recent explosion in tasteful seaside Airbnbs. ‘I’m an artist, really,’ she’d explained, with a certain aggressive earnestness. ‘Are you into art, Rozie?’ Rozie hadn’t explained that she possessed her very own Cézanne. She had come by it in highly unusual circumstances, which she didn’t want to talk about.

The fourth member of the original swimming group, a man called John, had already gone home, so Rozie just had Mary, Alan and Renée to talk to. She knew what would happen next, and let them ask her the inevitable questions about what the Queen was up to at Sandringham, and whether she’d recovered from her cold, and what it was like to work for her.

‘An honour,’ Rozie said.

‘I keep thinking about what you told me,’ she said to Mary, ‘about Mr Wallace worrying about losing all those memories of his wife when he lost the house. It sounds heartbreaking.’

‘It was,’ Mary said grimly. ‘Those St Cyrs are total, stuck-up bastards, whatever anyone says. They’ve got the reputation for being generous and caring, with the lamb boxes at Easter and Flora going round like Lady Muck if anyone’s off sick, but we know the truth now.’

‘And you said the Wallaces were friends of theirs?’

‘Well, Laura thought she was Lee’s friend,’ Mary said. ‘Clearly not. But the aristocracy are another country, aren’t they? They do things differently there. Without Laura, they wouldn’t have kept their flock of Norfolk Horns going, and that’s one of the things that makes Ladybridge special. When Lee had her breakdown, it was Laura who picked up the pieces and put her back together. Not the baron – he was useless.’

‘The baroness had a breakdown?’ Renée leaned forward, fascinated, and saved Rozie asking the question. ‘When was that? I didn’t know.’

‘Mmm,’ Mary said. ‘It was a long time ago, when Valentine and his sister were kids. Laura lived next to the school and she had a boy the same age as Valentine, so it was easy. I always had the impression Valentine had done something.’

‘Oh? How?’ Rozie asked.

‘Dunno,’ Mary said, frowning. ‘No, wait. I remember, we were outside church and I was asking Laura how Lee was – this was in the middle of the crisis – and she said nothing much, she was very discreet, but Valentine was standing about ten feet from us, just an ordinary boy about eleven or twelve, and the look Laura gave him! Of course, after that we didn’t see him much. He went off to boarding school and I’ll tell you one thing, before that, Lee had vowed her kids wouldn’t go away. She’d always said there was a perfectly good secondary school at Swaffham they could go to. I admired her for that. But then suddenly Valentine was gone and I did ask why, but Laura simply wouldn’t talk about it. She stuck by Lee to the bitter end, and look what they did to her. Turned her beloved Chris out of his house for no good reason. Rumour is, Flora wants it for her London guests, because it’s warmer than the hall. I wouldn’t put it past them.’

‘Flora isn’t popular on the estate, then?’ Rozie asked.

‘She was,’ Alan said, hesitating a little. ‘But that was before all this. You get to see a person in a new light sometimes. It’s no coincidence that this all happened after her mother died in the summer. The baroness was good at holding everything together. It’s falling apart now.’

They chatted on for a while about the fund that was being set up in Chris’s memory to give to his favourite wildlife charities. Rozie sensed that was all she was going to learn. Laura Wallace had protected her secrets. If she had told them to anyone, it would have been to the man she shared her life with, and he was dead.

The Queen fiddled with her spectacles. ‘It’s unfortunate for us that Laura was so loyal to the baroness. Lee chose her friends well. She was like that herself, you know.