Murder Most Royal

The floating object was a plastic bag: an old supermarket one, stretched and torn, its handles knotted, with two pale tentacles poking through. Grabbing a stick that floated nearby, she used the tip to lift it out of the puppy’s reach and looked nervously inside. Not a jellyfish, no: some other sea creature, pale and bloated, wrapped in seaweed. She intended to take the bag back with her for disposal later, but as she walked back towards the beach, the puppy straining against his collar at her feet, the contents slithered through a rip and plopped onto the damp, dark sand.

The girl assumed at first that it was a mutant, pale-coloured starfish, but on closer inspection, moving the seaweed aside with her stick, she realised it was something different. She marvelled for a moment at how almost-human it looked, with those tentacles like fingers at one end. Then she saw a glint of gold. Somehow one of the tentacles had got caught up in something metal, round and shiny. She peered closer and counted the baggy, waxy ‘tentacles’: one, two, three, four, five. The golden glint came from a ring on the little finger. The ‘tentacles’ had peeling human fingernails.

She dropped the broken bag and screamed fit to fill the sky.

Chapter 1

The Queen felt absolutely dreadful in body and spirit. She regarded Sir Simon Holcroft’s retreating back with a mixture of regret and hopeless fury, then retrieved a fresh handkerchief from the open handbag beside her study desk to wipe her streaming nose.

The doctor is adamant . . . A train journey is out of the question . . . The duke should not be travelling at all . . .

If her headache hadn’t been pounding quite so forcefully, she would have found the right words to persuade her private secretary of the simple fact that one always took the train to Sandringham. The journey from London to King’s Lynn had been in the diary for months. The station master and his team would be expecting her in four and a half hours, and would have polished every bit of brass, swept every square inch of platform and no doubt had their uniforms dry-cleaned to look their best for the occasion. One didn’t throw all one’s plans in the air over a sniffle. If no bones were broken, if no close family had recently died, one soldiered on.

But her headache had pounded. Her little speech had been marred by a severe bout of coughing. Philip had not been there to back her up because he was tucked up in bed, as he had been all yesterday. He had no doubt caught the infernal bug from one of the great-grandchildren at the pre-Christmas party they had thrown at Buckingham Palace for the wider family. ‘Little Petri dishes’, he called them. It wasn’t their fault, of course, but they inevitably caught everything going at nursery school and prep school, and passed it around like pudgy-cheeked biological weapons. Which young family should she blame? They had all seemed perfectly healthy at the time.

She picked up the telephone on her study desk and asked the switchboard to put her through to the duke.

He was awake, but groggy.

‘What? Speak up, woman! You sound as though you’re at the bottom of a lake.’

‘I said . . .’ she paused to blow her nose ‘. . . that Simon says we must fly to Sandringham tomorrow instead of taking the train today.’ She left out the bit where Sir Simon had suggested Philip should remain at the palace full stop.

‘In the helicopter?’ he barked.

‘We can hardly use a 747.’ Her head hurt and she was feeling tetchy.

‘In the navy we were banned . . .’ wheeze ‘. . . from flying with a cold. Bloody dangerous.’

‘You won’t be piloting the flight.’

‘If it bursts my eardrums you can personally blame Simon from me. Bloody fool. Doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’

The Queen refrained from pointing out that Sir Simon was an ex-naval helicopter pilot and the GP who had advised him was thoroughly sound. He had his reasons for counselling in favour of a quick journey by air instead of a long one by rail. Philip was ninety-five – hard to believe, but true. He shouldn’t really be out of bed at all, with his raging temperature. Oh, what a year this had been, and what a fitting end to it. Despite her delightful birthday celebrations in the spring, she would be glad to see the back of 2016.

‘The decision is made, I’m afraid. We’ll fly tomorrow.’

She pretended she didn’t hear Philip’s wheezy in-breath before what would no doubt be a catalogue of complaints, and put the phone down. Christmas was fast approaching and she just wanted to be quietly tucked up in the familiar rural comfort of Sandringham, and to be able to focus on her paperwork without it swimming in front of her eyes.

* * *