Murder Most Royal

The Queen had once overheard a guest suggesting it looked like an ice-cream parlour at Harrods, but surely that wasn’t a bad thing? As always, the room was lit by candles alone, whose flickering glow, she hoped, could make even the most ravaged of cold-ridden faces look reasonably attractive. An artificial silver Christmas tree twinkled near the window. The wine was excellent and the venison was cooked to perfection. But every time the conversation veered away from the St Cyrs, it somehow veered back.

‘Of course, it’s a raging husband the police should be looking for,’ Andrew suggested. ‘Ned St Cyr famously had an eye for a posh girl in jodhpurs.’ He grinned at his sister, who told him to shut up.

‘Was he an artist?’ Camilla asked. ‘They said on the news his London place was an artist’s studio.’

But nobody could remember, or rather, they couldn’t agree. Simon, or possibly Paul, had given Georgina the surname Longbourn on her marriage during the war. They had all lived at Ladybridge Hall together, along with Georgina’s younger sisters and her dashing little brother, Patrick, and Ned had been Ned Longbourn until the age of eight when Paul, or possibly Simon, divorced Georgina and fled to Greece, where he painted and drank until the drink finally killed him and young Ned inherited the studio flat in Hampstead and the captain’s house on Corfu.

It was questionable whether Georgina noticed. She was always more interested in her horses and helping her father look after the estate. After the divorce, she reverted to her maiden name and Ned took it too. He’d inherited his mother’s red-gold hair and Roman nose, her charisma, her love of fast cars, her occasional temper, her charm . . . The two properties were the only things his father ever gave him, as far as they knew.

‘After her father died, Georgina bought Abbottswood,’ Philip explained, ‘Nice Regency villa. Not on the scale of Ladybridge, obviously. The Yanks had had the place during the war and the house was a wreck, but the grounds were good.

Designed by Repton, apparently.’ Philip’s knowledge of the house and its surroundings surprised no one at the table. If he was interested in something he tended to know everything about it, and local architecture was one of his hobbies. ‘Georgina retired there like something out of Dickens, though she was only in her forties. Only rode to hounds and hardly spoke to anyone.