Murder Most Royal

Murder Most Royal (Her Majesty the Queen Investigates #3) by S.J. Bennett

Elizabeth II, 1926–2022

This book is dedicated to the Queen, with love and gratitude

PART 1 THE HAND OF FATE

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.

Native American proverb

DECEMBER 2016

The girl on the beach emerged into the light and stared out across the mudflats at the horizon. She had been checking the hides at the end of the path to the wildlife reserve at Snettisham, on the Norfolk coast, to see how they had weathered the night’s heavy storm. By day, the huts were home to birdwatchers who came from miles around to observe the geese and gulls and waders. By night, they were an occasional refuge from the cold sea breeze for beers and . . . more intimate activities. The last big storm surge had smashed up some of the hides and carried them into the lagoons beyond. This time, she was glad to see, the little piggies at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had built their home out of more solid wood.

Back outside, the girl studied the skyline. One of the things she loved about this place was that here, at the edge of East Anglia, on the eastern most coast of the United Kingdom, the beach stubbornly faced due west. It looked out on to the Wash, a bay formed like a rectangular bite out of the coastline between Norfolk and Lincolnshire, where a clutch of rivers ran into the North Sea. No pale pink sunrise here; instead, the sun had risen above the lagoons at her back. Ahead, a bank of cloud sat low and heavy, but the watery light gave it a pale gold glow that was mirrored in the mudflats, so that it was hard to tell where the earth ended and the air began.

Not far from the lagoons, a little further along the shore to her left, lay the marshy fringes of the Sandringham Estate. Normally, the Queen was there by now, with Christmas so close, but the girl hadn’t heard of her arrival yet, which was strange. The Queen, like the sunrise and the tides, was generally a reliable way of marking time.

She glanced upwards, where a trailing skein of pink-footed geese flew in arrowhead formation, home from the sea. Higher still, and closer, a hen harrier circled in the air. There was a brutal, brooding quality to Snettisham Beach. The concrete pathway at her feet, and the skeletal wooden structures jutting out into the mudflats beyond the shingle, were relics of her great-grandfather’s war. Shingle mining for airbase runways had helped create the lagoons, where ducks and geese and waders now gathered in their thousands, filling the air with their hoots and honks and quacks. The gulls had deserted the land for decades, her father said, after the constant bombardment of artillery practice into the sea. Their return was a triumph of nature. And goodness knew, Nature needed her little triumphs. She was up against so much.

Most of the birds themselves were out of sight, but they’d been busy. The expansive mudflats ahead were the scene of a recent massacre, pitted with thousands upon thousands of footprints of all sizes, where goldeneyes and sandpipers had landed once the tide receded, to feast on the creatures who lived in the sand.

Suddenly, a black-and-white bundle of fur caught the girl’s eye as it raced from right to left across the mud. She recognised it: a collie-cocker cross from a litter in the village last year who belonged to someone she didn’t consider a friend. With no sign of its owner, the puppy sped towards the nearest wooden structure, its attention caught by something bobbing in the sky-coloured seawater that eddied around the nearest rotten post.

The storm had littered the beach with all sorts of detritus, natural and man-made. Dead fish were dumped with plastic bottles and dense, bright tangles of fraying fishing nets. She thought of jellyfish. They washed up here, too. The stupid young dog could easily try to eat one and get stung and poisoned in the process.

‘Hey!’ she shouted. The puppy ignored her. ‘Come here!’

She began to run. Arms pumping, she hurtled across the scrubby band of lichen and samphire that led down to the shingle. Now she was on the mudflats, too, the subterranean water seeping into each footprint left by her Doc Martens in the sand.

‘Stop that, you idiot!’

The puppy was worrying at an amorphous, soggy shape. He turned to look at her just as she grabbed at his collar. She yanked him away.