Murder Most Royal

‘Helena Fisher filled me in on the details. Ned, being Ned, was intoxicated by the whole thing. Instead of waiting and planning like any sensible person, he’d ordered the animals in by the truckload. Beaver, boar, those deer we saw . . . To absolutely no one’s surprise, they got through his inadequate fencing in minutes, and they’ve been making his neighbours’ lives a misery. The beavers flooded half of Matt Fisher’s beet crop at Muncaster. There was an incident with wild boar, too, would you believe. They dug up every bit of lawn around the house. Left it looking like the Somme, two days before he was due to hold his daughter’s eighteenth in the garden. He threatened to kill Ned to anyone who’d listen.’

‘I’m sure he didn’t mean it,’ the Queen said.

‘Really?’

‘Nobody would kill their neighbour because of a few wild animals, Philip.’

‘What do you mean? Show me a landowner whose fields have been turned to ponds by overactive beavers, and I’ll show you a man bent on homicide.’

‘In theory,’ she agreed. ‘But he wouldn’t actually go through with it.’

‘The trouble with you, Lilibet, is that you’re too forgiving. You overestimate the human spirit.’

‘The strength of the human spirit is what keeps me going.’

‘Matt wasn’t the only one, though. They were queueing up to criticise. Farmers don’t want the land turned into forest.’

‘You’d hardly kill someone for growing trees, either.’

‘D’you think? They kill locals by the dozen for trying to stop ’em being chopped down in the Amazon. Happens every day. It’s an international disgrace.’

How had they got from Abbottswood to the Amazon? the Queen wondered. When he was in this sort of mood, her conversations with her husband could be stretching.

‘Mind you, it wouldn’t be a farmer,’ Philip went on. ‘Too many other ways of disposing of the body parts. Take pigs, for example. Or a midden. Or a slurry pit. He wouldn’t have needed to resort to plastic bags in the Wash.’

‘Philip! I’d rather not have this conversation, and especially not just before dinner. Ned was such a charming little boy.’

‘He bloody wasn’t. He was a rascal. Anyway, it can’t have been Fisher because he’s been in Barbados since the beginning of December,’ her husband concluded. ‘Only got back the day before we arrived, and that was after the storm. Unless he ordered a hit while he was away and they brought the hand down to prove they’d done it and lost it somehow.’

‘Philip! I mean it!’

Her page interrupted them to tell her that her APS was on the phone. She walked over to the old-fashioned instrument on a table near the door and picked up the receiver.

‘Yes? What is it?’ There was a long pause while she listened. ‘Ah. That was quick. Are they sure? Thank you, Rozie.’ Sad and somewhat disturbed, she put the phone down.

‘News from the chief constable?’ Philip asked.

‘Yes. They’ve brought a man in for questioning who calls himself Jack Lions. He’s Ned’s son from his second marriage – the one with the nanny. Rozie will have more details in the morning.’

‘So they’ve got him!’ Philip looked mildly triumphant, as if their recent conversation hadn’t happened. ‘You see? I told you. It’s always the family.’

Chapter 8

The arrest had been sudden and violent.

As always, a full raft of papers was delivered to Sandringham in the morning and laid out in the saloon for everyone to read. Several featured news of the arrest in a suburb west of London, accompanied by old photographs of a semi-shaven, surly, long-haired man, unmistakably a St Cyr by birth, with his tall, rangy frame and strawberry blond curls, dressed in dirty clothes and heavy boots, marching for climate change or posing with a spade in a shady allotment, looking as if he may have been planting tomatoes or burying something unspeakable in the dirt.

‘Poor bastard,’ Philip said, brandishing the Telegraph at the others over coffee after breakfast. ‘Ned, I mean. Georgina must be turning in her grave.’

‘Has he actually been charged?’ Anne asked.

‘Not yet. But according to this kiss-and-tell so-called friend—’ Philip waved the paper again ‘—Lions was a magnet for trouble right back to his school days. Expelled for taking cannabis. Fell in with a crowd of drop-outs and eco-warriors. Hasn’t held down a proper job for longer than a few weeks. Unless you count teaching drumming in a tent at music festivals, which, frankly, I don’t.’

‘Why did he do it?’ the Queen wondered.

‘According to this, he was mentally unbalanced. Psychotic episode, they’re suggesting.’

‘Don’t those episodes happen quite suddenly?’ she asked. ‘I thought Ned had been invited to a meeting. It sounded rather organised.’

‘Who knows? Perhaps the boy lost his temper. If he was on drugs, he might have been capable of anything.’

‘Hmmm.’

‘Anyway, the whole thing’s done and dusted,’ Philip said. ‘I’m glad Bloomfield has it squared away. Good man.’