Murder Most Royal

‘They like to give the impression that we orchestrated the whole thing!’ Philip exploded. ‘Or at the very least that the police are our toadies, rushing around to save our reputations as if the country is some sort of tinpot dictatorship. All we ever do is cut bloody ribbons at their bloody police stations. And give them medals for saving the public’s bloody lives. Bastard,’ he muttered again.

The Queen was the last to see the paper, having overexerted herself the night before, and spent the morning incapacitated by the remnants of the flu. At ninety, her body occasionally reminded her that she needed to take care of it.

The paper didn’t help. The extensive exclusive interview with Jack Lions was splashed across pages four, five and six, accompanied by several photographs of Sandringham House, herself at a window (taken about ten years ago in Scotland), as if she was spying on events through a curtain, the chief constable arriving at Sandringham in his Subaru, and an alarming image of several officers of the Met Police in full body armour, as if dozens of them had been dispatched to drag Mr Lions into the street.

It was the day after my first Christmas with my girlfriend and little baby girl, who was born six weeks ago. The birth was horrendous and Alana was still recovering. We were just starting to put all that trauma behind us when there was a battering at the door and the next thing we knew, the room was full of police shouting and my tiny little girl was screaming. I was picked up by a draconian squad of officers who bundled me into a van . . .

. . . They got me in a cell and you could see they didn’t have anything on me. They just needed somebody, fast, that they could pin the blame on because my dad’s severed hand was found on the Queen’s sporting estate . . .

But it wasn’t! she thought. However, that was beside the point.

. . . No question of letting me grieve for my father, who I’d just discovered had been kidnapped and dismembered. In fact, he’d told me about a new project to save the countryside that we were going to work on together. We’d been talking about it for weeks. My father had seen the light about his duty to the planet. We had reconnected. My life was going to turn around and now it was shattered. The police didn’t care. They spent endless hours questioning, trying to break me, so I could be the scapegoat and they could look good in front of a very rich old lady whose family has been responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent animals for the last thousand years. In fact, they hustled me out of my flat the very same day the Queen and her family were blasting hundreds of pheasants out of the sky at Sandringham . . .

And there it was: the reason for the failure to produce an alibi earlier, the waiting, the triumphant smile on his release. Vandalising a laboratory was small beer in the mind of an animal rights activist compared with dragging the royal family themselves into the debate. The next four paragraphs were about previous kings and their love of hunting, coupled with images of various family members on a stag hunt near Balmoral and King Edward VII shooting a tiger from the back of an elephant. In Mr Lions’s circles, he would be a hero.

Back in the saloon, everyone was nervously waiting for her reaction, which was silent, but dour.

‘It’s outrageous,’ Edward said. ‘What are we going to do about it?’

But they all knew the answer: never complain, never explain. However difficult, frustrating and infuriating that could be.