Murder Most Royal

To absolutely no one’s surprise, they got through his inadequate fencing in minutes, and they’ve been making his neighbours’ lives a misery. The beavers flooded half of Matt Fisher’s beet crop at Muncaster. There was an incident with wild boar, too, would you believe. They dug up every bit of lawn around the house. Left it looking like the Somme, two days before he was due to hold his daughter’s eighteenth in the garden. He threatened to kill Ned to anyone who’d listen.’

‘I’m sure he didn’t mean it,’ the Queen said.

‘Nobody would kill their neighbour because of a few wild animals, Philip.’

‘What do you mean? Show me a landowner whose fields have been turned to ponds by overactive beavers, and I’ll show you a man bent on homicide.’

‘In theory,’ she agreed. ‘But he wouldn’t actually go through with it.’

‘The trouble with you, Lilibet, is that you’re too forgiving. You overestimate the human spirit.’

‘The strength of the human spirit is what keeps me going.’

‘Matt wasn’t the only one, though. They were queueing up to criticise.

Farmers don’t want the land turned into forest.’

‘You’d hardly kill someone for growing trees, either.’

‘D’you think? They kill locals by the dozen for trying to stop ’em being chopped down in the Amazon. Happens every day. It’s an international disgrace.’

How had they got from Abbottswood to the Amazon? the Queen wondered. When he was in this sort of mood, her conversations with her husband could be stretching.

‘Mind you, it wouldn’t be a farmer,’ Philip went on.

‘Too many other ways of disposing of the body parts. Take pigs, for example. Or a midden. Or a slurry pit. He wouldn’t have needed to resort to plastic bags in the Wash.’

‘Philip! I’d rather not have this conversation, and especially not just before dinner. Ned was such a charming little boy.’

‘He bloody wasn’t. He was a rascal. Anyway, it can’t have been Fisher because he’s been in Barbados since the beginning of December,’ her husband concluded. ‘Only got back the day before we arrived, and that was after the storm.

Unless he ordered a hit while he was away and they brought the hand down to prove they’d done it and lost it somehow.’

‘Philip! I mean it!’

Her page interrupted them to tell her that her APS was on the phone. She walked over to the old-fashioned instrument on a table near the door and picked up the receiver.

‘Yes? What is it?’ There was a long pause while she listened. ‘Ah. That was quick. Are they sure? Thank you, Rozie.