Murder Most Royal

But I’ll only tell you, ma’am, and if anyone in the police or anywhere else asks me, I’ll deny it – under oath or whatever you like. I gave Lee a sacred promise. I think she’d make an exception for you, though.’ Moira half laughed. ‘And possibly the Pope.’

‘Good,’ the Queen said. ‘I’ve come all this way, after all.’

Moira nodded. ‘Lee met Ned through friends when he was nineteen and she was twenty,’ she began. ‘They often went to parties together – there were so many in those days – and she thought of him as a fun friend and useful companion because she didn’t have a boyfriend. There was a bit of kissing, a bit of fumbling in the haystacks after a Young Farmers ball. Lee was a free spirit that way, she said. Ned was magnetic, hugely popular, and she loved to live in the moment. But she was incredibly innocent, too.

‘Yes, I always thought so,’ the Queen agreed.

‘Ned hated it. He always just assumed Hugh had met Lee through him, because he knew her first. He had his eye on all sorts of girls in those days, but to hear him tell the tale, you’d think she was the only one. He wasn’t really in his right mind at all. His uncle Patrick had died in a horrible car crash two years before. He was still coming to terms with the fact that Hugh’s father Ralph was the new heir. He’d grown up always assuming he would live on the estate somehow and be a part of it. Patrick had led him to believe he could become manager in time. But overnight, Hugh, who’d always just been one of the unimportant cousins, became the heir. He’d taken Ned’s birthright – as Ned saw it – and now he’d taken his girl.’

‘Yes, that’s what I rather imagined,’ the Queen said.

‘A month before her wedding to Hugh, Lee turned twenty-one. Ned offered to organise a party for her at Ladybridge, as of course he’d often done before. He was famous for his parties.’

‘Georgina was in the process of moving into Abbottswood, and she was very bitter about leaving Ladybridge Hall. Lee knew all this. She told me she thought Ned was very sweet and generous to come back to his old ancestral home and sprinkle his magic one last time. It seemed to be a sign that the cousins would eventually make up and get on together, which is what she wanted. Lee only ever wanted people to get on. She was very naive that way.’ Moira eyed the Queen sideways through a scented haze of vape smoke.

‘It’s not such a bad ideal to aspire to, surely?’

‘But quite impossible,’ Moira said. ‘She shouldn’t have let Ned organise the party. She should have realised what it would put him through.’

‘And what did it put him through?’ the Queen asked.

‘Well, according to Lee, he started drinking early that night. There was a certain wildness about him. He kept on ensuring her glass was topped up, too. Lee was terribly nervous, knowing that one day she would be chatelaine of Ladybridge, with the tenants, the farms and entertaining . . . and she found all that sort of thing quite terrifying at the time.

‘He’d lit the courtyard with a thousand bulbs and installed a dance floor. She danced with Hugh there, and then again in the lush grass of the pasture, just the two of them, while music drifted across the moat. She said that was one of her fondest memories. Then they went back and joined their guests and partied until it was almost dawn.’

‘It sounds delightful. But it didn’t end there, I take it,’ the Queen said.

‘Well, no,’ Moira agreed. ‘Hugh “Still Waters” St Cyr went to bed. He and Lee were being very correct. She intended to be a virgin until her wedding night even though it was the late nineteen-sixties, but lots of girls were still like that. But – oh, I remember now – she told me that with Hugh being so close, and the moon, and all that champagne, she was very tempted to say to hell with it, with only four weeks to go. She was plucking up the courage to follow him to his bedroom, when she ran into Ned in the corridor outside the billiard room where they’d been drinking, and he told her not to go. She assumed he was enforcing her original pact with Hugh, so she agreed. She was grateful, even, the silly girl. But then . . . Ned became very insistent. He was hugely charismatic, as you know. He was twenty-three and very drunk, and he went on some sort of rant about how they should make babies together, how beautiful they would be, how she had always been the only woman he had ever cared about, how their children would inherit Ladybridge following “the true line”. All sorts of rot. She said she tried to talk him out of it, but . . . he was very passionate.’

‘In what way?’ the Queen asked sharply. ‘“Passionate?”’

‘Did she know?’ the Queen asked. ‘Who the father was? I suppose perhaps she didn’t.’

‘She was worried about Hugh’s reaction? And Valentine’s, too?’

‘Well, certainly Hugh’s.