Murder Most Royal

A minute later, the car drove past a square-towered gothic church, set back from the road. It soared impressively from its flat surroundings, probably built by the wealth of wool merchants in the fifteenth century, she thought. Philip would know. Once upon a time it would have been a Catholic place of worship, with elaborate stalls for formal confessions. When the Church of England took over, had it been a wrench or a relief for the local people to lose the priest as their essential connection to God’s forgiveness? she wondered. In her experience, people needed someone. If they couldn’t talk, their pain came out in other ways. She had seen so many fall apart.

And as the car drove on, she saw serried rows of wine bottles in her mind’s eye.

‘I’d like to visit the estate office before we go to Sandringham House,’ she said to Lady Caroline. ‘The car can come back for me. And can you let Mrs Maddox know I’ll be a little late for tea? There’s something I must do.’

* * *

The car paused outside the red-brick building while the Queen knocked on the estate office door. Once inside, passing several shocked staff, she asked Julian Cassidy if she could see him alone. Her unannounced arrival was unusual, but she sensed that he was more weary than surprised. She noticed the slackness of his tie, the saggy skin, the poorly ironed shirt, the unkempt hair that badly needed a cut, through which he was running a distracted hand. He reminded her a little of the foreign secretary on a bad day. He was a man with a lot on his mind.

Cassidy led her into his cosy office, with its old-fashioned furniture, its smell of dog, and its view of pine and birch trees.

‘Can I offer you a seat, ma’am?’ He indicated a sturdy Edwardian armchair, but the Queen refused. This would be a stand-up conversation.

‘Mrs Raspberry was knocked over a week before Christmas,’ she began. He said nothing and feigned confusion, but she saw the wariness that settled over him as he stood facing her. ‘Someone was speeding through Dersingham in the dark. It was just after a bend in the road. It’s not surprising, perhaps, that they didn’t see her, but they would have felt something.’ Cassidy was still as a statue. She wasn’t sure he was even breathing. ‘The impact must have caused damage to the car.’ She waited.

‘I imagine it must,’ he said eventually.

‘Whoever hit her had probably been drinking. That’s why he was going too fast, why he didn’t react in time, why he didn’t stop.’

He swallowed. ‘That may be true. I was asked about the accident because my own car was damaged two days later, actually.’

‘Helena Fisher was your witness, wasn’t she?’

‘Yes. She happened to be passing . . .’

‘Was she? And did she happen to be passing two days before, when you did indeed speed through Dersingham?’

Cassidy ran his hand through his hair again. His right eye was slightly bloodshot. She watched as he fought a look of rising panic. He reminded her of Arthur Raspberry for a moment. But she had far more sympathy for the teenager.

‘I don’t know what you mean, ma’am.’

‘I mean that Judy Raspberry deserves better than your conspiracy with your lover. It was one of the shortest days of the year. I don’t think you meant to hit her, but you were on your way home from a boozy lunch and it was already dark, you weren’t concentrating on the road, and the next thing you knew—’

‘I—’ He stared at her. There was a long silence that filled the stuffy room. He licked his dry lips. ‘I honestly thought it was a deer, escaped from the bog, or a badger. I didn’t see anything, but there was suddenly just this . . . thud. And a sort of paleness against the windscreen. I panicked. I slowed down and looked behind me and I couldn’t see anything in the road, and then I saw a dark shape and I thought perhaps it had been a badger after all.’

‘You didn’t stop,’ the Queen repeated, sharply.

‘I couldn’t.’ He flushed.

She saw how wretched he looked and added, ‘I think we’d better sit down after all.’

She took the armchair he had originally offered her, and he slumped into the heavy office chair beside the desk.

‘You seem to know about me and Helena,’ he said dully. ‘We’d arranged this night away. We tried to go somewhere nobody would see us. There’s this little place near Holkham . . . We drove back separately. I’d had a couple of glasses of Shiraz at lunch and I knew if the police breathalysed me I’d lose my licence, and this brand-new job I had here, which was everything I’d worked for, and . . . Everything was so good.’ He looked at the Queen with baleful, bloodhound eyes. ‘It was all so good,’ he repeated, ‘and I didn’t want to lose it all over a bloody badger.’

‘A badger.’ The Queen gave him an implacable stare. ‘And the next day? You must have found out by then what had really happened.’

He looked down and said nothing.

‘You could have gone to the police then. They were asking for witnesses.’