Murder Most Royal

Ahead, a bank of cloud sat low and heavy, but the watery light gave it a pale gold glow that was mirrored in the mudflats, so that it was hard to tell where the earth ended and the air began.

Not far from the lagoons, a little further along the shore to her left, lay the marshy fringes of the Sandringham Estate. Normally, the Queen was there by now, with Christmas so close, but the girl hadn’t heard of her arrival yet, which was strange. The Queen, like the sunrise and the tides, was generally a reliable way of marking time.

She glanced upwards, where a trailing skein of pink-footed geese flew in arrowhead formation, home from the sea. Higher still, and closer, a hen harrier circled in the air. There was a brutal, brooding quality to Snettisham Beach. The concrete pathway at her feet, and the skeletal wooden structures jutting out into the mudflats beyond the shingle, were relics of her great-grandfather’s war. Shingle mining for airbase runways had helped create the lagoons, where ducks and geese and waders now gathered in their thousands, filling the air with their hoots and honks and quacks.

Most of the birds themselves were out of sight, but they’d been busy. The expansive mudflats ahead were the scene of a recent massacre, pitted with thousands upon thousands of footprints of all sizes, where goldeneyes and sandpipers had landed once the tide receded, to feast on the creatures who lived in the sand.

Suddenly, a black-and-white bundle of fur caught the girl’s eye as it raced from right to left across the mud. She recognised it: a collie-cocker cross from a litter in the village last year who belonged to someone she didn’t consider a friend. With no sign of its owner, the puppy sped towards the nearest wooden structure, its attention caught by something bobbing in the sky-coloured seawater that eddied around the nearest rotten post.

The storm had littered the beach with all sorts of detritus, natural and man-made. Dead fish were dumped with plastic bottles and dense, bright tangles of fraying fishing nets. She thought of jellyfish. They washed up here, too. The stupid young dog could easily try to eat one and get stung and poisoned in the process.

‘Hey!’ she shouted. The puppy ignored her.