Murder Most Royal

He won’t want to hear this on the news and then find out the identification came from someone at Sandringham and we didn’t tell him first.’

After a brief call to her contact at the Norfolk constabulary HQ to update them on the identity, Rozie called Ladybridge Hall. She had half hoped to speak to an underling such as herself who could pass on the grisly details, but it was the Right Honourable the Lord Mundy himself (she had looked it up to make sure of his title) who answered the phone. He was silent for a long time, pondering the news. Having said her piece as gently as she could, Rozie wondered if he was still on the line.

‘Are you all right, My Lord?’

‘Goodness me.’ He sounded breathless. ‘I need to sit down. Oh, my goodness.’

‘I’m sorry to be the one to—’

‘Oh, no, my dear, don’t apologise. And do call me Hugh. Thank you for calling. Very considerate of you.’ He had the cut-glass accent and almost exaggerated good manners of his class, reminding Rozie of the many earls and dukes she had encountered in this job. But they usually sounded formal and composed, whereas he seemed all at sea. ‘So you’ve informed the police?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ Rozie admitted. Sir Simon probably did.

‘It’s early days,’ Rozie explained. ‘The police don’t really know anything yet.’

‘Well, you’re very kind to inform me. I . . . Excuse me. I don’t know what to . . . How did Her Majesty find out about it?’

‘The hand was found near Sandringham. The police told us as a courtesy.’

Rozie took a breath. ‘It was the ring, My Lord.’ She couldn’t call him Hugh. She hadn’t yet developed Sir Simon’s ease at hobnobbing with the aristocracy.

‘My goodness . . . The ring . . . I have one myself, just like it . . .’

He tailed off again and Rozie pictured him staring at his own left hand.

‘Don’t be. There’s nothing you . . . Oh, my goodness. Thank you for calling, my dear. Please wish Her Majesty a happy Christmas on our behalf. I hope she feels better soon.’

‘I’ll tell her,’ she assured him, but she wouldn’t. The last thing the Boss would want was people outside the family circle remarking on her ill health.

Afterwards, she went back to her laptop and typed in ‘Edward St Cyr’.

Wikipedia informed her that he was born in 1946, the only grandson of the tenth Baron Mundy. After growing up at the St Cyr family seat and brief sojourns in Greece, London and California in the 1970s, where he had managed two failed rock bands, he had joined his mother at a small estate called Abbottswood, south of King’s Lynn, where he hosted a couple of controversial rock concerts and, later, what was briefly the second-most popular literary festival in Norfolk. He had been married and divorced three times, his second wife being the nanny to the children with his first. There were links here to various newspaper articles about the scandal, which Rozie ignored. He was on the boards of various charities, two of which were anti-addiction and one that supported the welfare of refugees in Greece.

A subsequent search on Google Images brought up pictures of a tall, rangy man with skin the colour of milky tea, a sharp nose, ruddy cheeks and straight, bushy eyebrows over eyes as blue and piercing as the Queen’s.

In earlier pictures, Edward lounged moodily as a young man against bougainvillea-clad white walls, barefoot in bell-bottom jeans and faded T-shirts, accompanied by women in minidresses with Brigitte Bardot hair. Later, alongside a variety of slim, blonde companions in tight-fitting dresses, he seemed to favour pink and purple jackets that were just this side of fancy dress.

By the most recent photographs, he seemed to have adopted the more relaxed country style of a waxed jacket over a denim shirt, a battered trilby hat and a fringed cotton scarf that brought out the colour of his eyes. His face could look forbidding, accentuated by those eyebrows and prominent nose, but when he smiled, showing bright, white, un-British dentistry, he had a charisma that drew you instantly to him, even in the images where his hair had faded from burnished copper to spun gold.

In the latest photograph she could find, he was standing at the rear of an old Land Rover Defender, painted pink, with three dogs sitting in the back. He was resting his arm against the open door and the signet ring was clearly visible on the little finger of his left hand. It made her shiver.

After supper, which the Queen ate in the dining room with her lady-in-waiting, Philip called down from his bed.

‘I hear Ned St Cyr has been chopped into pieces. What on God’s earth?’

He sounded utterly appalled, and slightly better.

‘Not exactly. They found one piece.’ The Queen was enjoying a post-prandial whisky in the saloon with her lady-in-waiting before going up to bed herself.