Murder Most Royal

‘I looked perfectly well then,’ she said, observing herself from her vantage point on the nearest sofa.

‘That was before the little Petri dishes got going. Which one of you buggers was it?’ Philip demanded, glancing round.

‘You look lovely now,’ Sophie said gamely. You could always rely on Sophie to say the right thing, even if in the teeth of the evidence.

Familiar with what she was going to say to the nation and the Commonwealth, the Queen let her gaze drift from the television to a small gap in the panelling, marking the hidden door.

The room where she had spoken to the chief constable was the one where her father and grandfather used to record their Christmas messages for the radio. They were broadcast live to an empire that seemed to power the world. How quickly that idea had become history, and both her life and her father’s had been spent managing the transition.

For a moment, she pictured him beside her again, his hand reassuringly on her shoulder. These feelings didn’t completely fade, even after so many decades.

He had died in his bedroom upstairs, aged only fifty-six, and she had been far away, in Africa. Halfway across the world.

‘Mummy, are you all right?’ Anne asked.

‘It’s just this dreadful flu. Pass me my handbag and I’ll find a handkerchief.’

‘One thing you can be sure of,’ Mrs Maddox said to a select audience in the housekeeper’s sitting room a few hours later, ‘it wasn’t one of the family.’

‘What? A prince, you mean?’ one of the butlers asked, to brief sniggering, quickly shushed.

This evening, the housekeeper was holding court with the household staff while the royals, for a brief moment, looked after themselves. Rozie, who had spent the day missing the spice and flavour of her mother’s cooking in her family’s flat in West London, and the equal spice of her cousins’ friendly, bickering conversation around the table, was grateful to be asked along. Technically, she was too senior to join the ‘downstairs’ staff, but at Sandringham such distinctions seemed to shift like the tides.

‘Why’s that, then?’ the butler asked.

‘Because,’ the man sitting beside Rozie said, ‘if you want to inherit, you need a body.’ This was Rick Jackson, one of the Queen’s long-standing protection officers and chief inspector at the Met. ‘Or you have to wait seven years before you can declare the man dead.’

‘So where d’you think it is then?’ a lady’s maid wondered.

‘Me personally?’ Jackson queried. ‘Limed. In a quarry somewhere.