Murder Most Royal

The Queen felt very bleak. New Year’s Eve had been so full of happiness and hope at Sandringham, as they danced into the small hours. The following morning had been marred by Jack Lions’s interview, but that had been an annoyance, really, nothing more. To think that, only a few miles away, a man’s life was ending in such a tragic way.

There was a pause while she called Willow to her and stroked under the corgi’s warm ears. That was the day she had found out about Judy Raspberry. She had been convinced that the hit-and-run was part of a bigger picture. Someone was covering their tracks. Yet wherever she looked for conspiracies she found coincidences. She had been too sure of herself. Even after ninety years, she needed to learn humility sometimes.

But the suspicious death of someone connected to the St Cyr family seat? That didn’t smack of coincidence at all. Her moment of humility passed. She patted the dog and looked at Rozie.

‘Has Katie arranged to talk to . . .’ she consulted the article once more ‘. . . The Dix Dunkers?’

Rozie nodded. ‘She’s meeting one of them tomorrow, ma’am.’

PART 3 THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

Chapter 21

The little village of Vickery, much like West Newton, consisted of neat cottages lined up along well-tended roads. It looked as if it had just been swept and clipped, ready to star in the sort of Christmas movie where the heroine, home for the holidays, discovers the sexy wickedness of Hugh Grant and chooses – inexplicably – to settle down with someone safe at the end of the third reel. Rozie used to watch those kind of movies with her sister when they were both tired from studying, curled up on the duvet side by side, waiting for their mother to shout at them to turn off the light. She had always dismissed the settings as unreal, but now she knew that wasn’t true: they existed, when wealthy landlords wanted them to.

It was Rozie, not Katie, who was visiting the organiser of the Dix Dunkers. Katie had called to say she’d had a bad night and could barely make it down the stairs. By coincidence, it was Rozie’s morning off. She had put aside the run and the personal grooming session she had planned for herself. And here she was.

Mary Collathorn lived in ‘the cottage with the two weeping pears in the front garden’, as she’d explained to Rozie. ‘You can’t miss it.’ The twin domes outside the fourth building she passed looked exactly like the ones she had looked up on Google Images. She parked her Mini outside.

‘So you’re thinking of taking up wild swimming?’

‘Mmmm.’ Rozie sipped her expertly made cappuccino. It pained Rozie slightly to repay Mary’s hospitality with a series of lies, but they were in a good cause. Nothing, if truth were told, would inveigle her into freezing cold water voluntarily. She wasn’t crazy. But for the purposes of the visit, she had been recommended to the group by someone in Dersingham who had heard great things about them. She made some noises about wanting to swim in a river, rather than the sea, as that’s what they seemed to do most of the time. ‘I’m sorry about your recent loss, by the way,’ she added. ‘I read about Mr Wallace.’

‘Oh, it was terrible, what happened to him,’ Mary said. ‘We’re all reeling. He was such a fixture on the Ladybridge Estate.’

‘Was he? Was he connected to the family in some way? The St Cyrs, I mean.’

‘Oh! Do you know them?’ Mary asked.

‘I met some of them at Sandringham,’ Rozie said. She usually kept very quiet about her encounters behind closed doors, but today, gossip seemed very much in order. ‘Did Chris work for them?’

‘Most people do, round here,’ Mary said. ‘Chris was a second-generation tenant, like me. His father was the mechanic for Patrick St Cyr in the early sixties. It was all very glamorous back then.’

Rozie noticed the way Mary expected her to know who everyone in the family was, and why working for someone called Patrick should be glamorous. It was a bit like Sir Simon and Debrett’s again.

‘Remind me about Patrick?’ Rozie said.

‘He was the heir at the time – the tenth baron’s son. He threw the most famous parties in East Anglia. But really, he wanted to be a racing driver. My mother remembers him dashing round the lanes in a series of blue sports cars. He used to talk about setting up his own racing team one day. Mr Wallace – senior, that is – was always working on something for him, and if he wasn’t busy on the cars, there were the tractors. He made clocks, too, I remember. After the accident, he was worried he’d lose his job, but the family in those days were very loyal.’

‘The accident?’