Murder Most Royal

With a trilby hat and a bright blue scarf, it would be easy to mistake him for Ned.

He was breathing more stertorously than his horse.

‘Why did you have to butt in?’ he bellowed. ‘I told you! Chris Wallace has nothing to do with me. He was just a tenant with mental problems. What I do with my property is my affair. If you thought you knew something, you should have come to me.’

‘Why?’ the Queen asked, astonished.

‘I could have explained. You would have understood. You say the police know Ned fathered Val, but you know me, for God’s sake.

I wouldn’t have killed him for that. I could have told the police as much, if they’d asked me. Certainly, I’d have punched Ned’s lights out, with pleasure. Any man would. No man would have judged me. But I promised Lee I wouldn’t touch him.’ He was agitated. The Queen sensed that the dredging of the moat was coming home to him at last. A body with poison in the stomach was something he couldn’t talk his way out of.

‘Then she started to die and you felt released from your vow’.

Hugh glared at her. ‘You say you know what happened,’ he resumed. ‘You have no idea.’ The horse pawed the ground and Hugh took no care to calm it, or himself. He boiled with rage. ‘He held her down,’ he growled, his eyes boring into hers. ‘Lee was too frightened to struggle. He clamped his hand so hard over her throat while he was . . . doing it . . . that she thought she was going to die. Years later, if I put my hands tenderly anywhere near her neck, she would panic as if she was drowning.

He did that to her.’

‘And so you cut his hand off,’ the Queen muttered, understanding at last.

Hugh glared at her. ‘She deserved no less. It was over. He was dead by then anyway. No one need have known. But now . . . D’you realise what you’ve done?’ he said. Astride his jumpy horse, he towered above her. ‘It’s all right for you. You’ve got the next three generations sewn up.

What about my children? My grandchildren? The police might have dredged up a skeleton in a few generations. It would have been impossible to prove how it got there. It would have been a St Cyr family mystery, that’s all. I did everything to protect them.’

‘You killed a man and drove another to his death, Hugh.’

He ignored her. ‘Now it will be a scandal.’

‘That’s hardly my fault.’

‘Is it mine?’ He was shouting now, white with anger.