Murder Most Royal

‘I’d have gone to the police straightaway, but after all the names they called Mrs Raspberry, they can sing for it, quite frankly. Somebody needs to find out if this is true. You will promise me you’ll look into it, won’t you?’

Ollie hadn’t promised, but he’d looked into it anyway.

It took a lot to persuade a cash-strapped police force to dredge a moat. The ‘how the body got there’ was the relatively easy part. His first thought, like Mrs Day’s, was that Ned might be buried at Abbottswood somewhere, and the police had missed it. But a bit of digging had quickly thrown up the fact that nobody who knew Ned well had seen him since he visited the hall for lunch with his much-hated family. Not only had he not left Abbottswood, there was no guarantee he’d even arrived home. Flora Osborne could easily have lied about seeing him wave goodbye. His cousin Valentine could have pretended to be him in London.

The thing was, once you started, you kept finding holes in the story the police had constructed. Ollie had spoken to the man who, according to a short interview he gave to the Recorder, was the last person to talk to Ned St Cyr alive. Mr Shah was the newsagent in Highgate where St Cyr had bought the items for his breakfast. He told Ollie he recognised him from his height, his clothes and the colour of his eyes. It had not occurred to him it might not

be Mr St Cyr, who he knew vaguely. The man at the takeaway, same story. The footage from the traffic cameras wouldn’t be conclusive.

The ‘why’ was the hard part. If Ned had died at Ladybridge, who stood to gain? After all, he was the poor relation. It had taken hours of careful research to find evidence that Ned and Valentine might be related, based on the timing of Valentine’s birth. If Ned was Valentine’s father . . . bombshell: no more legitimate male St Cyrs to carry on the title. If he was using this knowledge to blackmail them for money for his new project, for example, then there was your motive. One DNA test was all it would take. Maybe the police had already done it. Ollie didn’t have any proof of any of this, but as a theory it held water.

He didn’t know what the family alibis were, but if he was right, there would be holes. The police would already know about them, or they would find them. Ollie needed something to give them, beyond tittle-tattle, and in the end it was the age-old standby: fingerprints. He simply asked if Ned’s prints were on the steering wheel of the car he’d used to drive away from the hall. Ollie’s contact in the Norfolk force admitted they were heavily smudged, but this was explained by the driving gloves found in his Maserati in London. Ollie trawled through the archives of the Recorder and unearthed several images of St Cyr in or beside various cars through the ages. He had stopped wearing gloves in the 1980s. What about prints on the items he had bought from Mr Shah? All smudges. Nothing conclusive. Now they were starting to take him seriously. Hence this ringside view reward.

Yesterday, a police dog team had searched the hall from top to bottom, with no joy. But it didn’t take a genius to see where the body would be. It turned out there were a couple of ground-floor rooms with empty windows facing the moat. Ollie was stationed opposite them now. Presumably, the body had been weighted to ensure it sank to the bottom and stayed there, so without winds or tides to shift it around, it was unlikely to have moved from the spot.

So far, the hardest part had been getting the swans out of the way. Ollie had done a bit of research on swans for the long-form magazine article he’d be writing later. According to what he’d read, they used to be a major delicacy at medieval banquets, as a result of which the Queen could claim ownership of all swans not owned by a couple of livery companies in open waters. Presumably moat-based swans didn’t count. More pertinently for a day like today, they could be vicious if they felt under threat. If you weren’t careful, they could break your arm.

The divers were taking forever to adjust their kit before getting into the water. Ollie trained his binoculars on the house while he waited. Was that a ghostly face at one of the windows? He sharpened the focus. He wouldn’t swear to it, but it looked like Flora Osborne. What would she be thinking now?

* * *

The last guests of the season at Sandringham were finishing their stay. While Philip took them on a final shoot, the Queen was on her way to Newmarket for lunch with her racing manager and various trainers she knew and liked. Having heard about the recent police breakthrough in the St Cyr case, and their expectation of at least one imminent arrest, she could relax at last. She had been looking forward to the day tremendously. There was nothing like a good meal and an afternoon spent viewing horses and discussing the racing calendar with people who knew exactly what they were talking about.