Murder Most Royal

While she was at it, she looked up the current Lord Mundy. Hugh was the son of Ralph, the eleventh baron, who in turn was the nephew of Edward’s grandfather, the tenth baron, who had died without a living male heir. That made Hugh and Edward St Cyr second cousins. Sir Simon was right again. Rozie thought about the equivalent in her own family. She had a raft of second and third cousins, some in Nigeria, some in Texas and New York, and some in Peckham, South London. Thanks to social media, and the endless family chats set up by her mum and her aunties, she couldn’t avoid hearing what most of them were up to: the ‘good students’ (Rozie was one of these), the ‘bad boys’, the pastors, the finance whizz-kids, the Gen Z tech gurus, the ones who were settling down with kids (‘See, Rozie?’ as her mother would say), and the ones who, to her mother’s gentle despair, were trying to get their own lives under control before they created more Oshodis. It wasn’t quite the same thing as being ‘an ancient Norfolk family’, but a big family – yeah, she got that. And yes, if something happened to one of them, her mum would absolutely want to know.

A subsequent search on Google Images brought up pictures of a tall, rangy man with skin the colour of milky tea, a sharp nose, ruddy cheeks and straight, bushy eyebrows over eyes as blue and piercing as the Queen’s.

In earlier pictures, Edward lounged moodily as a young man against bougainvillea-clad white walls, barefoot in bell-bottom jeans and faded T-shirts, accompanied by women in minidresses with Brigitte Bardot hair. Later, alongside a variety of slim, blonde companions in tight-fitting dresses, he seemed to favour pink and purple jackets that were just this side of fancy dress.

By the most recent photographs, he seemed to have adopted the more relaxed country style of a waxed jacket over a denim shirt, a battered trilby hat and a fringed cotton scarf that brought out the colour of his eyes. His face could look forbidding, accentuated by those eyebrows and prominent nose, but when he smiled, showing bright, white, un-British dentistry, he had a charisma that drew you instantly to him, even in the images where his hair had faded from burnished copper to spun gold.

In the latest photograph she could find, he was standing at the rear of an old Land Rover Defender, painted pink, with three dogs sitting in the back. He was resting his arm against the open door and the signet ring was clearly visible on the little finger of his left hand. It made her shiver.

Chapter 3

After supper, which the Queen ate in the dining room with her lady-in-waiting, Philip called down from his bed.

‘I hear Ned St Cyr has been chopped into pieces. What on God’s earth?’

He sounded utterly appalled, and slightly better.

‘Not exactly. They found one piece.’ The Queen was enjoying a post-prandial whisky in the saloon with her lady-in-waiting before going up to bed herself. Who had told him? Gossip spread among the staff like wildfire and tended to mutate like Chinese whispers. Goodness knew what they were saying in the servants’ hall.

‘D’you remember that white ball he and Patrick did here for your mother?’

The Queen did. It was in the early sixties, when they still saw him on a regular basis. Ned must have been in his late teens, no more, but he and his uncle Patrick were already in partnership as party organisers to the gentry in about five counties. The idea for the ball at Sandringham had come in part from Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball in New York, and in part from portraits of royal princesses by Franz Winterhalter, who romantically depicted them in off-the-shoulder white dresses with generous crinolines. There was one such picture of the young Queen Victoria opposite the chair where the Queen was sitting now. Her own mother had dazzled like a film star that night in several tiers of ivory tulle. Ned had gone to enormous lengths to decorate the house with flowers from the famous white garden at Ladybridge, along with elaborate paper decorations he had made himself and hung in every room. The night had been magical . . . until an over-oiled guest had managed to throw up in one of the pianos, but that was hardly Ned’s fault.

‘It was months before that piano was right again,’ Philip muttered. ‘Years. There was always something with Ned. He is dead, I take it?’

‘I’ll come up,’ the Queen said. This was not a conversation to have over the phone, with her lady-in-waiting listening intently and a footman standing at the door.