Murder Most Royal

Mundy complained of a head cold on the seventeenth, so he didn’t join his family when they went to the ballet. The servants were at the other end of the house. Nobody usually enters that older part of the house. Mundy had plenty of time for what he needed to do. He wrapped it in chains so it would sink and lowered it through an open window. All the evidence adds up.’

‘Do you know if Ned died quickly?’ the Queen asked. It was possible to imagine various scenarios. She had tried hard not to picture some of them.

‘There was poison in the stomach, ma’am.

But also, his neck was snapped. He may have been hit on the head as well at that time. We think he was dead before Mundy left him. Later, his skull was caved in with a blunt instrument. A cricket bat, we’re pretty certain. The divers found one of those in the moat, too.’

The Queen patted her knee and Willow the corgi came over to sit on her lap. ‘Go on,’ she said.

‘It’s the cutting off of the hand that makes no sense to me,’ Bloomfield said. ‘It was the only body part that was missing.

Mundy had smashed the skull, but the right hand was intact. He hadn’t tried hard to make the body unidentifiable – and of course there was no point, given where we found it. It must have been something to do with the ring, but I doubt we’ll ever know exactly.’

‘No, I suppose not,’ the Queen agreed. She didn’t discuss her conversation with Hugh. Instead, she mentioned something else, which she suspected might also have contributed to the act. ‘I’ve been thinking.

Ned was about to end up in the moat. The ring was a symbol of family belonging. I suppose Hugh had to put the body in the moat because it was the easiest place to hide it . . .’

‘But he didn’t want Ned to belong. Is that it, ma’am?’ Bloomfield nodded soberly. ‘And I suppose it would have given him an excuse to mutilate the body. It reminds me, the choice of the plastic bag . . . I always found that intriguing. Something cheap and throwaway. It was an odd thing to take on that journey to scatter his wife’s ashes, don’t you think? Perhaps he chose it subconsciously—’

‘To grant Ned the least honour,’ the Queen finished for him, nodding to herself.

‘That could well be it.’

‘“The least honour”, ma’am. Exactly.’

‘But it had the effect of preserving the hand in the storm, didn’t it? I wonder if he meant to take it out, but was almost caught in the act by one of his children. I can picture him panicking and throwing the whole thing in.’

Bloomfield nodded.