Murder Most Royal

‘Oh, it was awful. Patrick was racing home through the Fens in his sports car after a storm. When I say racing, they think he was doing nearly a hundred miles an hour. He hit a patch of flooding, and he didn’t stand a chance. I saw the pictures of the car, upside down in a dyke. It was such a tragedy. His mother, the baroness, was a fragile woman. Her hair went white overnight, like Marie Antoinette’s. She made Chris’s father burn the car and dismantle the chassis and melt it down and bury what was left. She died the following year. His father hadn’t been fully well since the war; he went two years later. And now there was no male heir, of course, so the title went to a different branch of the family. But you don’t want to talk about them – you want to talk about swimming. You’ll love it, I promise you.’

For a good ten minutes, Rozie discussed the benefits of immersing the human body in very cold water. Having tried it in the army during various exercises, she still maintained that it was a terrible idea unless absolutely necessary for the security of the nation, but she practised looking fascinated. Afterwards, it wasn’t hard to veer the conversation back towards the subject of Chris, who had been such a passionate convert to wild swimming. As Katie suspected, he knew all the rules of swimming in very cold water. He simply would not have gone out alone, and stayed out for so long, by accident.

‘You don’t think . . .? I mean, there’s no reason to suppose he wasn’t alone, is there?’ Rozie said.

Mary’s eyes widened. ‘D’you mean, did someone make him do it? Oh, goodness! What a horror! No! People aren’t speculating about that in Dersingham, are they?’

‘One or two were wondering . . .’ Rozie said, feeling hugely disloyal to A Load of Balls and the Sweary Stitchers, even though she wasn’t a member.

Mary looked militant. ‘Well, you can put their minds at ease, if you can call it that. I know why he went out that day. He absolutely intended to do what he did. It was simply awful.’

Rozie said nothing. Sometimes silence and an interested expression was enough.

‘He was recently widowed, you know. Laura, his wife, was the shepherdess for the farm. They’d lived in that cottage forty years. She died in the bedroom, with him beside her. The kids were born there. Laura poured her heart and soul into the place. She was diagnosed with cancer at about the same time as the baroness. The last one, I mean – Lee. They nursed each other through it. You’d think the family would have some decency. But after the baroness died . . .’

‘What happened?’

Mary shook her head. ‘Chris said they’d told him the cottage was wanted for a bloody Airbnb. They were giving him three months to get out. He had nowhere else to go, no idea what to do. I drank a dram of whisky with him on New Year’s Eve and I could see how overwrought he was.’

‘So you think he went into the sea like that deliberately?’

‘Oh, I’m sure of it. I made a promise to myself that I’d go over after lunch on New Year’s Day and check he was OK. But by then it was already much too late. He’d left his wallet in a bag on the beach. I was his emergency contact, so they called me.’ Tears spilled silently down her cheeks. ‘And I was just here, making soup.’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Rozie said gently.

Mary gazed at her fiercely through the tears. ‘Of course it wasn’t! I know exactly whose fault it was.’

Chapter 22

The Sunday morning service at St Mary’s in Flitcham went very well. There was a bit of a to-do beforehand when the Queen’s protection team discovered a packet of drugs hidden under one of the kneelers. But the incident was over and done with before the Queen arrived.

On Monday, the outgoing US ambassador made his formal goodbye to the Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps, representing Her Majesty at Buckingham Palace. She had written the man a warm personal note for him to pass on. The ambassador had been very fond of London, and London was very fond of him. His departure marked the end of an era. The PM’s formal announcement of the UK’s exit from the Single Market marked another one. They were only halfway through January and what a year of change this was already turning out to be.

The annual visit to the West Newton branch of the WI on Thursday came at just the right time. Such cyclical events, like the church calendar, conferred a comforting rhythm on life which was very much needed. The Queen wasn’t the only woman to feel it. Everyone seemed grateful to be there.

Of course, the talk was largely about Judy Raspberry, the much-missed treasurer. She was sitting up in bed in her ward at the Queen Elizabeth, already itching to be home, but she still couldn’t remember anything about her accident. She had heard that Her Majesty herself had asked after her health, and was very touched.

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