Murder Most Royal

We must come to you for advice. You do it so beautifully.’

‘Flora’s doing a magnificent job,’ her father said. ‘In fact, Lee and I talked about letting her inherit Ladybridge when the time comes.’

‘That’s rather what we thought.’

No, the Queen couldn’t.

‘I can’t stop thinking about it,’ Flora went on. ‘He must have been high on drugs or something. And we’re actually related. It’s quite terrifying, really. You do wonder if such things are genetic, don’t you? You just can’t help it. We saw Ned just before he disappeared and you’d think he had another twenty years in him.

’ She looked at the royal couple shrewdly. ‘Or thirty.’

‘You saw him recently?’ the Queen asked.

‘We met up a few times. We were just starting to mend fences. Not literally. Ned and broken fences seemed to be a bit of a theme lately. We had lunch the day before he vanished. The police were horribly suspicious. A couple of them came round, took one look at the armoury in the hall and asked us a thousand questions. They seem to think we might have grabbed a halberd from one of the walls, dashed up to London and—’

‘Were you aware of the recent pigeon club scandal, ma’am?’

The Queen, who had become absorbed by this sudden talk of Ned’s last known movements, was shocked to find Roland Peng standing in front of her again, leading her gently but firmly away from the others.

Anyway, it was too late. Roland had her cornered now, and told her a long and involved story, told to him by his grandfather in Singapore, about drug gangs in the UK who bought their way into pigeon racing clubs so they could use the sale of prize pigeons for nefarious money-laundering purposes.

Roland wondered if the practice had yet reached Norfolk. She assured him it hadn’t. The fellow pigeon fanciers she encountered in East Anglia were some of the most straightforward people she knew. By the time she had reassured him not to worry, Hugh St Cyr was talking about the future of British farming in the wake of the loss of EU subsidies, and the conversation had moved on.

When the front door was shut behind them, Charles came to join his mother in the saloon. ‘Well, that went better than I feared. Poor Hugh, though. He looked practically at death’s door.’ And, as if prompted by that thought: ‘You’re not too exhausted, are you, Mummy?’

‘No, I can just about stand, thank you,’ she told him drily. ‘So tell me, what was Flora saying about Ned’s visit? I was distracted by pigeons.’

The Queen nodded. She still wasn’t so sure.