Murder Most Royal

’

Rozie stood by, while the Queen asked the palace operator to put her through to Hugh St Cyr.

But in the end, it was Flora who came on the line.

‘Hello, Your Majesty. I’m afraid Dad’s visiting the stables. Can I help?’

The Queen was suitably sympathetic about the arrest of her brother, but Flora sounded defiant.

‘Valentine’ll be out in no time. He’s innocent, so they have nothing to charge him with. It’s just a bore that he has to be in the news. You know how it is.’

‘I do,’ the Queen said. ‘I’m sure the family’s rallying round.

‘We absolutely are,’ Flora assured her.

‘Presumably you were all together when he took the boat out?’

There was a strangled cough, then silence. Poor Flora. The Queen felt her shock at being asked the question – and being asked it by her sovereign, suddenly, in conversation, and not by a police inspector, in an interview. She sounded rattled when she answered. ‘Yes, we were, ma’am. Of course we were. It was a family outing – long planned.’

‘Scattering Lee’s ashes, I understand.

‘It was almost funny, really, in a horrible sort of way. We were all busy brushing her off each other. Dad had ash in his eyebrows. Of course we should have checked the wind direction, but we were idiots. Our minds were on other things.’

She felt growing certainty about how the deed was done, but as things stood, the wrong person entirely had died. And that was rather a ‘deal-breaker’, as Harry would say, when it came to getting to the bottom of a murder.

An hour later, Sir Simon returned to deliver his report and discuss the prime minister’s upcoming trip to America. After a discussion of the special relationship, which seemed to be worryingly less special with each new US incumbent, he handed the Queen a basket of private correspondence to look through, and tapped a big, padded envelope at the top.

‘It’s just arrived. Rozie asked me to bring it to your attention, ma’am. Apparently, the archivist has found the letters from the Queen Mother that you asked about.

‘Goodness!’ the Queen said. ‘How quick. She must have worked through the night.’

‘The archivist? She’s very diligent, ma’am.’

She picked the envelope off the pile. Normally ‘Thank you, Simon’ was the equivalent of ‘Goodbye’, and he knew it, and yet when she glanced up, he was hovering. She looked at him questioningly.