Murder Most Royal

‘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.

‘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.’

‘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.