Murder Most Royal

‘I’ve always liked Hugh, and I’m sorry to think he was so unkind to the boy, but what if he suspected that the real father was his cousin, Ned? Valentine looks like a typical St Cyr – he has the height and hair, the distinctive profile. Who else could have given him those features? I wonder if Valentine himself saw it, too, at Lee’s funeral, when Ned attended. That was the first time he had met him in person, as far as I know. There is something about meeting a relative in person that’s different from seeing them in photographs. One can have an extra sense of them that can’t always be explained. I’ve often had that feeling myself.’

Moira looked down, considering what to say. ‘And Hugh suspected an affair, you mean?’ she asked eventually. ‘That Lee had been unfaithful with his cousin?’

‘It seems an obvious conclusion,’ the Queen said. ‘Lee knew Ned first. I can imagine that would be very difficult for a man to come to terms with. Very difficult indeed.’

Moira tipped her head back and regarded the Queen speculatively through half-lowered lids. ‘It would be, wouldn’t it?’ Then she got up, went to the kitchen and came back with her handbag. She took out a slim, black pen-like object and held it up. ‘D’you mind if I vape?’

The Queen had grown up in a fug of her father’s smoke. She still missed it sometimes. ‘Please do,’ she said.

Moira closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. When she opened them again, the look she gave the Queen was cool and uncompromising.

‘I’ll tell you the story because you’ve guessed half of it, and like anyone would, you’ve guessed it wrong. But I’ll only tell you, ma’am, and if anyone in the police or anywhere else asks me, I’ll deny it – under oath or whatever you like. I gave Lee a sacred promise. I think she’d make an exception for you, though.’ Moira half laughed. ‘And possibly the Pope.’

‘Good,’ the Queen said. ‘I’ve come all this way, after all.’

Moira nodded. ‘Lee met Ned through friends when he was nineteen and she was twenty,’ she began. ‘They often went to parties together – there were so many in those days – and she thought of him as a fun friend and useful companion because she didn’t have a boyfriend. There was a bit of kissing, a bit of fumbling in the haystacks after a Young Farmers ball. Lee was a free spirit that way, she said. Ned was magnetic, hugely popular, and she loved to live in the moment. But she was incredibly innocent, too.

‘And then she met Hugh, and everything changed. Her life went overnight from black and white to colour – that’s how she put it. She was a guest at a hunt ball up in Yorkshire. Ned wasn’t there, but her brother had brought Hugh along. At first she was intrigued by the cousins’ similarities. But where Ned was shallow, Hugh was deep. Ned could be selfish and unreliable, and up to then she’d assumed all young men were, but Hugh was honest and devoted. Her still waters, she called him. She fell for him hard in the space of a weekend and never changed her mind. You know how much fun she was, how gregarious, but there was an inner quality of calm to her, too. Hugh saw it and mirrored it. As soon as you saw them together you could tell they were right.’

‘Yes, I always thought so,’ the Queen agreed.

‘Ned hated it. He always just assumed Hugh had met Lee through him, because he knew her first. He had his eye on all sorts of girls in those days, but to hear him tell the tale, you’d think she was the only one. He wasn’t really in his right mind at all. His uncle Patrick had died in a horrible car crash two years before. He was still coming to terms with the fact that Hugh’s father Ralph was the new heir. He’d grown up always assuming he would live on the estate somehow and be a part of it. Patrick had led him to believe he could become manager in time. But overnight, Hugh, who’d always just been one of the unimportant cousins, became the heir. He’d taken Ned’s birthright – as Ned saw it – and now he’d taken his girl.’

‘Yes, that’s what I rather imagined,’ the Queen said.

‘A month before her wedding to Hugh, Lee turned twenty-one. Ned offered to organise a party for her at Ladybridge, as of course he’d often done before. He was famous for his parties.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Georgina was in the process of moving into Abbottswood, and she was very bitter about leaving Ladybridge Hall. Lee knew all this. She told me she thought Ned was very sweet and generous to come back to his old ancestral home and sprinkle his magic one last time. It seemed to be a sign that the cousins would eventually make up and get on together, which is what she wanted. Lee only ever wanted people to get on. She was very naive that way.’ Moira eyed the Queen sideways through a scented haze of vape smoke.

‘It’s not such a bad ideal to aspire to, surely?’

‘But quite impossible,’ Moira said. ‘She shouldn’t have let Ned organise the party. She should have realised what it would put him through.’

‘And what did it put him through?’ the Queen asked.