Murder Most Royal

Mrs Maddox was a commanding presence, with an inscrutable expression and a helmet of immaculately cut, bobbed hair that made her look uncannily like Anna Wintour – should the editor of Vogue ever forgo sunglasses and don a festive plastic tiara. The resemblance had been noted by many a Sandringham guest, so often, in fact, that the family now took bets on how long it would take someone to mention it.

‘What? A prince, you mean?’ one of the butlers asked, to brief sniggering, quickly shushed.

‘No, really, Mr Roberts! One of his family.’

This evening, the housekeeper was holding court with the household staff while the royals, for a brief moment, looked after themselves. Rozie, who had spent the day missing the spice and flavour of her mother’s cooking in her family’s flat in West London, and the equal spice of her cousins’ friendly, bickering conversation around the table, was grateful to be asked along. Technically, she was too senior to join the ‘downstairs’ staff, but at Sandringham such distinctions seemed to shift like the tides.

‘Why’s that, then?’ the butler asked.

‘Because,’ the man sitting beside Rozie said, ‘if you want to inherit, you need a body.’ This was Rick Jackson, one of the Queen’s long-standing protection officers and chief inspector at the Met. ‘Or you have to wait seven years before you can declare the man dead.’

Mrs Maddox nodded. ‘Precisely, Mr Jackson. So, anyone hoping to inherit from Mr St Cyr would be trying to provide an identifiable body, not hide one.’

‘So where d’you think it is then?’ a lady’s maid wondered.

‘Me personally?’ Jackson queried. ‘Limed. In a quarry somewhere. I think the hand was a trophy. Then they got scared they had it, so they threw it away. Or they got told to. There are a million better ways of doing it, though.’

‘Surely not?’ Mrs Maddox interjected. ‘Mr St Cyr was hardly some sort of gangster. If you go back enough generations, I think he’s related to the Queen.’

‘That’s hasn’t stopped anyone before,’ Jackson pointed out. ‘In some periods of history, it was a motive.’

‘It needn’t have been for the inheritance, mind you,’ Rozie mused, returning to the original point. ‘There are other reasons for killing a relative.’

‘True,’ Mrs Maddox agreed. ‘But I can’t see why anyone would want to in this case.’

‘Three bitter divorces,’ the lady’s maid pointed out.

‘Yes, but the last one was twenty years ago,’ Mrs Maddox observed. ‘Poor man. He was unlucky in love. He told me about it one evening at the festival. He lost the love of his life at twenty-one and never really loved a woman again. He was a true romantic.’

‘Not exactly,’ the lady’s maid scoffed. ‘The way he treated his wives was shocking. My friend used to work for Christina, the third one. He had this system. When he came to get divorced, he suddenly had no money. He was living on thin air, no savings, practically bankrupt, and he couldn’t afford to give them a decent settlement. Then as soon as everything was finalised, back came the nice cars, the trips to Greece to his old house, which was now owned by a friend of his. Convenient.’

Mrs Maddox looked disapproving. ‘I can’t imagine him doing that. He talked so fondly about all his children.’

The lady’s maid shrugged. ‘Easy to do that when you’re not paying for their keep. He told them it was good for them to look after themselves, like he’d had to. Those poor kids. But I agree with you, Mrs Maddox, this isn’t a woman’s crime.’

‘What’s a woman’s crime when it’s at home?’ the butler asked. ‘Some of the nastiest murders in history’ve been done by women.’

‘Name one.’

The butler thought for a minute. ‘John the Baptist. We saw the play once. Salome did the dance of the seven veils and when she was asked what she wanted, she said John the Baptist’s head. And she got it, on a plate. I remember those veils.’

‘Sure,’ Mr Jackson said from beside Rozie. ‘But I bet it was a man that cut it off and gave it to her. Women tend to be more impulsive. Or more indirect.’

‘Women tend to be the victims,’ the lady’s maid put in gloomily.

‘Actually, they don’t,’ Mr Jackson said. ‘Overall, victims of homicide are eighty per cent men. But those killed by a partner are eighty per cent women, I’ll give you that.’

‘That’s it!’ Mrs Maddox announced, unknowingly mirroring the Queen’s reaction. ‘Enough murder talk on Christmas Day. Now, will somebody make me a negroni and let’s talk about something else?’

Chapter 7

After a feverish night, the Queen woke early. The sky beyond her bedroom window was a watercolour wash of pink and lavender, infused from below with frosty light. She sat quietly against her pillows for some time, waiting for her headache to abate and grateful, for once, that there wasn’t room at Sandringham for her personal piper.