Murder Most Royal

‘About the new world order? She never does. She’s lived through a war that we can barely imagine. She’s lost an Empire and gained a Commonwealth. She survived Lady Di.’ He sat up straight. ‘I must be more Queen. Less self-indulgent. How can I help you?’

‘Did you see this?’ she asked. She showed him a headline on her phone:

POLICE QUESTION MAN, 47, UNDER CAUTION FOR MURDER OF ARISTOCRAT WHO WAS QUEEN’S NEIGHBOUR

‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘Sorry, forgot to tell you. Bloomfield called last night. A fisherman’s come forward. Lady Mundy used to keep a clinker at King’s Lynn, to sail on the Ouse. He saw Valentine St Cyr on the boat, heading out into the Wash on the twenty-first of December. That puts him in the exact place the hand probably went in. But more than that, he had consistently refused to say what he was doing that day. You’d think, if you were perfectly innocent in such suspicious circumstances, you’d let the police know before they found out for themselves and tell your side of the story, wouldn’t you? Or perhaps you’d deny it entirely. Anyway, he doesn’t deny it now. He claims he was scattering his mother’s ashes.

‘You’re seeing the Boss next, aren’t you? Do tell her. She’ll be horrified, because she’s known the man since he was a baby. But justice is justice. She’ll be reconciled, eventually.’

The Queen seemed unsurprised when Rozie passed on the news about the ashes scattering. ‘Yes, that explains everything. He probably was.’

She stared at the blotter on her desk for quite some time. ‘I think I need to make a telephone call. I can’t imagine Valentine would come all the way to Norfolk and take the family boat out on his own. He came as rarely as he could, from what I understand.’

Rozie stood by, while the Queen asked the palace operator to put her through to Hugh St Cyr.

But in the end, it was Flora who came on the line.

‘Hello, Your Majesty. I’m afraid Dad’s visiting the stables. Can I help?’

The Queen was suitably sympathetic about the arrest of her brother, but Flora sounded defiant.

‘Valentine’ll be out in no time. He’s innocent, so they have nothing to charge him with. It’s just a bore that he has to be in the news. You know how it is.’

‘I do,’ the Queen said. ‘I’m sure the family’s rallying round.’

‘We absolutely are,’ Flora assured her.

‘Presumably you were all together when he took the boat out?’

There was a strangled cough, then silence. Poor Flora. The Queen felt her shock at being asked the question – and being asked it by her sovereign, suddenly, in conversation, and not by a police inspector, in an interview. She sounded rattled when she answered. ‘Yes, we were, ma’am. Of course we were. It was a family outing – long planned.’

‘Scattering Lee’s ashes, I understand. Another difficult day.’

‘It was almost funny, really, in a horrible sort of way. We were all busy brushing her off each other. Dad had ash in his eyebrows. Of course we should have checked the wind direction, but we were idiots. Our minds were on other things.’

She felt growing certainty about how the deed was done, but as things stood, the wrong person entirely had died. And that was rather a ‘deal-breaker’, as Harry would say, when it came to getting to the bottom of a murder.

An hour later, Sir Simon returned to deliver his report and discuss the prime minister’s upcoming trip to America. After a discussion of the special relationship, which seemed to be worryingly less special with each new US incumbent, he handed the Queen a basket of private correspondence to look through, and tapped a big, padded envelope at the top.

‘It’s just arrived. Rozie asked me to bring it to your attention, ma’am. Apparently, the archivist has found the letters from the Queen Mother that you asked about. One of the junior equerries was travelling from Windsor this morning and he brought them with him.’

‘Goodness!’ the Queen said. ‘How quick. She must have worked through the night.’

‘The archivist? She’s very diligent, ma’am.’

She picked the envelope off the pile. Normally ‘Thank you, Simon’ was the equivalent of ‘Goodbye’, and he knew it, and yet when she glanced up, he was hovering. She looked at him questioningly. ‘Yes?’

His own face burned with suppressed curiosity. Of course he wanted to know what was inside, and why she wanted it so badly. He couldn’t ask her outright about private letters from her own family, but he was clearly hoping she’d tell him anyway. There was a brief stand-off, while neither spoke. Eventually, he gave in.

‘That will be all, I take it,’ he said.

‘Thank you, Simon,’ she repeated firmly.

He shut the door behind him and she pulled the letters out.

There were about three dozen in all. Her mother had been a prolific letter writer, with many friends in Norfolk who eagerly wrote back.