Murder Most Royal

‘You don’t have a ring like his,’ she observed.

‘No. We’re the Shropshire branch of the family. It’s the Norfolk St Cyrs who go in for the bloodstone ring. We always thought big stones like that were rather naff.’ He raised his left hand, which bore a small gold ring on the little finger, similar to many that Rozie saw on the hands of royals and senior household staff.

‘So is it naff not to wear a ring?’ she asked, looking at her own long, nimble fingers.

‘No,’ Henry told her, tracing one of his fingers down her arm from shoulder to wrist. ‘I like your fingers bare. Like this bit.’ He slid his hand under the sheet.

She threw a pillow at him and crawled out of bed.

* * *

The shooting party set out together across the estate in a motley collection of Range Rovers, Land Rover Defenders and an ancient shooting bus, in the direction of Wolferton, towards the marshes. To avoid paparazzi lenses, they drove down a series of tracks made for military vehicles during the war, observed only by a hovering kestrel and the occasional pheasant that whirred up from the ground like a helicopter before breasting the hedgerows on the breeze.

Overnight, a hoar frost had layered every twig, leaf and seed head with heavy ice. The almost horizontal rays of a pale sun, penetrating a light layer of low cloud, made the wide fields of stubble glint and twinkle. Rozie could see why the royals got out of bed for this. In fact, she felt sorry for anyone who had chosen not to come out with them. If there was a way of doing it without dressing up in tweed and shooting the funny, silly, colourful pheasants out of the sky, she’d be all for it. Not that she would share that particular train of thought with anyone here.

She stood at the edge of the field where the first drive was due to begin. The guns were having their safety briefing on one side while the observers and pickers-up shared conversation and slugs of sloe gin in a huddle on the other. Henry, her equerry-with-benefits, was among the guns. Everyone seemed to have been to school with one another, or knew one another’s parents. Like Henry, they had all been on shoots since childhood and knew exactly what to do. Rozie knew her way around a rifle, but had only started rough shooting with shotguns in the summer, and never on anything as formal as this, with whistles and clickers and pegs to show each gun where to stand, and matching pairs of shotguns that cost more than her university education. It was like going back a century in time.

‘Hullo. How are you getting on?’

She looked round to see the friendly face of Lady Caroline Cadwallader, the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, hands thrust into the pockets of her tweed jacket.

Rozie explained her mission from Sir Simon.

‘In case it’s one of us, d’you mean, who did it?’ Lady Caroline asked.

‘No, just—’

‘It is, isn’t it? You want to spare the Queen embarrassment. Well, I knew Ned, so you can put me on your list, but I hadn’t seen him in an age. We moved in the same circles as teenagers. Our mothers came out together.’

‘Came out?’ Rozie asked.

‘As debs, not lesbians,’ Lady Caroline clarified breezily. ‘In 1939. What a year. So many of the men they danced with that summer were dead five years later. One of my uncles was shot down over Belgium and another was lost in the North Sea. Georgina’s father was never the same. He came back a shadow of the man they sent to war. Anyway, what was I saying?’

Rozie reminded her, and Lady Caroline peered out across the field.

‘Ha! I don’t think the Queen’s set are the sort who have people dismembered. We’ve entertained the odd guest at Buckingham Palace I’ve had my doubts about, but that was official business.’ She surveyed the line of men and women taking up position at their pegs. ‘To be honest, most people you can see probably are connected to Ned one way or another. I mean, take that man there.’ She pointed to a broad-backed, middle-aged man positioned just beyond Prince Charles. ‘That’s Gerry Harcourt-Worthorpe, the Earl of Mayfield. He married Ned’s first wife, Nancy, after Ned took up with the nanny.’

‘Oh, right. Is Nancy here too?’ Rozie wondered.