Murder Most Royal

’

The Queen was the last to see the paper, having overexerted herself the night before, and spent the morning incapacitated by the remnants of the flu. At ninety, her body occasionally reminded her that she needed to take care of it.

The paper didn’t help. The extensive exclusive interview with Jack Lions was splashed across pages four, five and six, accompanied by several photographs of Sandringham House, herself at a window (taken about ten years ago in Scotland), as if she was spying on events through a curtain, the chief constable arriving at Sandringham in his Subaru, and an alarming image of several officers of the Met Police in full body armour, as if dozens of them had been dispatched to drag Mr Lions into the street.

But it wasn’t! she thought. However, that was beside the point.

And there it was: the reason for the failure to produce an alibi earlier, the waiting, the triumphant smile on his release. Vandalising a laboratory was small beer in the mind of an animal rights activist compared with dragging the royal family themselves into the debate.

The next four paragraphs were about previous kings and their love of hunting, coupled with images of various family members on a stag hunt near Balmoral and King Edward VII shooting a tiger from the back of an elephant. In Mr Lions’s circles, he would be a hero.

Back in the saloon, everyone was nervously waiting for her reaction, which was silent, but dour.

‘It’s outrageous,’ Edward said. ‘What are we going to do about it?’

But they all knew the answer: never complain, never explain.

However difficult, frustrating and infuriating that could be.

‘Should we call Sir Simon?’ someone asked.

‘No,’ the Queen said decisively. ‘Rozie can deal with it. She knows the form.’

‘This won’t be the end of it,’ Anne muttered.

The Queen agreed. Cold-ridden and otherwise occupied, she had hoped she could avoid involvement with this case. Now, the press had placed her at the heart of it, whether she liked it or not.

Sir Simon Holcroft lay wide awake in his bed in London, after a long and complicated journey down from The Highlands.

The private secretary had left his wife Sarah in the charming Balmoral cottage to finish their holiday alone. The Queen needed him at Sandringham, that was obvious. She hadn’t actually contacted him to say as much, but everything was clearly falling apart in his absence. Body parts in the mud . . . newspaper interviews . . . the Queen’s absence at church on Christmas Day.