Murder Most Royal

Bloomfield was still adjusting to his surroundings. He paused to look down at his trousers, where Vulcan was energetically sniffing his leg, and bent to give the corgi a reassuring stroke. The Queen had a lot of time for people who instinctively fondled the ears of friendly dogs. He straightened. ‘I wish I had better news, ma’am. Edward St Cyr was last seen in London on the fourteenth of December. My senior investigating officer is up there now. Mr St Cyr spent the night at his flat in Hampstead, prior to a meeting the following morning. He was certainly in a hurry. He was caught speeding twice on the A13 in his Maserati.’

‘He was rather known for speeding, I seem to remember.’

‘Ah. We can’t say for sure if he attended the meeting on the fifteenth. However, he wasn’t at Stansted Airport to meet his fiancée that afternoon. She couldn’t get hold of him, so she reported him missing the next day, which by then was the sixteenth, eight days ago. We weren’t unduly worried because he was known to go off grid occasionally. People go missing more often than you might think, ma’am.’

‘Oh, I know,’ the Queen said. She was familiar with the statistics, which were grim. It was alarming to discover how many of those who were subsequently found had good reasons for staying away.

‘Of course, this identification casts a new light on everything,’ Bloomfield said. ‘The Maserati’s still parked outside the flat; the friends have heard nothing; St Cyr’s phone hasn’t been used since he first went up to London. There’s no record of him leaving the country. We’re confident the DNA analysis will confirm the hand is his.’

‘Oh, dear. Does anyone at Abbottswood have any light to shed on what happened?’

‘No, ma’am. Mr St Cyr lived alone, unless his fiancée was visiting. There’s a cleaning lady who comes in three times a week, a local cook who obliges on request, and a groundsman who lives in the gatehouse, but he wasn’t there.’

The Queen nodded. A few decades ago, a place like Abbottswood would have bristled with servants, but it didn’t surprise her that Ned might rattle round his house these days. He was divorced, his children grown-up, and long gone were the days when the gentry could afford live-in staff, unless they found ways to make those houses pay. Which, as Philip had pointed out last night, Ned had serially failed to do. The poor man must have been quite lonely. She herself, she knew, would go stark, staring mad if left entirely to her own devices. She thrived on company.

‘What was his meeting about? Does anyone know?’

‘Not yet. It’s marked in his diary as “RIP”.’

‘“RIP”? How unsettling.’

‘Yes, ma’am. We have reason to believe it was a location. He used that sort of annotation for events in his diary. He seems to have gone out on schedule, expecting to come back. The breakfast dishes were still in the sink and there were no signs of violence. We’ll find out what he was up to soon enough. We’re checking local CCTV in Hampstead. Forensics are already hard at work on his home computer here at Abbottswood. He kept all his passwords on a sticky note he stuck to the monitor, would you believe? His security all round was very . . .’ The chief constable sighed. ‘You mustn’t speak ill of the dead and so on, but I sincerely wish we’d had the chance to talk him through a few basic procedures. Still, it speeds things up for us significantly. And it helps that whoever did this is making it easier for us, too.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, the hatchet job on the hand, for starters,’ Bloomfield explained. ‘It was done, presumably, with the intention of making the body harder to identify.’

‘It rather backfired in that case, didn’t it?’ the Queen observed archly.

He nodded. ‘Precisely, ma’am. None too bright, our killer. Or killers, plural. They want the victim to be anonymous so they remove the, um . . . ah . . . distinguishing extremity, and decide to dispose of it out at sea. They put it in a plastic bag and instead of sinking to the seabed and being devoured by the creatures of the deep, it floats. It’s washed ashore by the storm, and in an entirely avoidable irony, it’s the only body part we have.’

The Queen winced. ‘Where do you think the rest of him is?’

‘Far away,’ he said decisively. ‘The whole idea was that nobody would think of St Cyr when they found the body. I imagine the, ah, head is not in good condition either. It could be buried the other side of London, or it might also be at sea. We may well find it washed up in Sweden in a couple of months. I’m sorry, ma’am. I realise he was a family friend.’