He was divorced, his children grown-up, and long gone were the days when the gentry could afford live-in staff, unless they found ways to make those houses pay. Which, as Philip had pointed out last night, Ned had serially failed to do. The poor man must have been quite lonely. She herself, she knew, would go stark, staring mad if left entirely to her own devices. She thrived on company.

‘What was his meeting about? Does anyone know?’

‘Not yet. It’s marked in his diary as “RIP”.’

‘“RIP”? How unsettling.’

‘Yes, ma’am. We have reason to believe it was a location. He used that sort of annotation for events in his diary. He seems to have gone out on schedule, expecting to come back. The breakfast dishes were still in the sink and there were no signs of violence. We’ll find out what he was up to soon enough. We’re checking local CCTV in Hampstead. Forensics are already hard at work on his home computer here at Abbottswood. He kept all his passwords on a sticky note he stuck to the monitor, would you believe? His security all round was very . . .’ The chief constable sighed. ‘You mustn’t speak ill of the dead and so on, but I sincerely wish we’d had the chance to talk him through a few basic procedures. Still, it speeds things up for us significantly. And it helps that whoever did this is making it easier for us, too.’

‘Well, the hatchet job on the hand, for starters,’ Bloomfield explained. ‘It was done, presumably, with the intention of making the body harder to identify.’

‘It rather backfired in that case, didn’t it?’ the Queen observed archly.

He nodded. ‘Precisely, ma’am. None too bright, our killer. Or killers, plural. They want the victim to be anonymous so they remove the, um . . . ah . . . distinguishing extremity, and decide to dispose of it out at sea. They put it in a plastic bag and instead of sinking to the seabed and being devoured by the creatures of the deep, it floats. It’s washed ashore by the storm, and in an entirely avoidable irony, it’s the only body part we have.’

The Queen winced. ‘Where do you think the rest of him is?’

‘Far away,’ he said decisively. ‘The whole idea was that nobody would think of St Cyr when they found the body. I imagine the, ah, head is not in good condition either. It could be buried the other side of London, or it might also be at sea. We may well find it washed up in Sweden in a couple of months. I’m sorry, ma’am. I realise he was a family friend.’

‘Not exactly,’ she said, reeling slightly at the thought of the head, which she hadn’t considered. Ned’s golden hair had always been a glory. ‘We hadn’t seen him for many years. But his mother was.’ She glanced across at the spot on the floor where Willow, the last remaining corgi, was enjoying a patch of winter sun on the carpet. Georgina had been a dog person, too. Always English or red setters, glamorous and slightly mad, always at least four of them. Thank God she was no longer around to hear any of this.

‘I’m surprised,’ she added, ‘that the Met aren’t dealing with the case, if Ned disappeared in London.’

‘He was reported missing in Norfolk, ma’am. There was an exchange of views about it between the forces, put it that way, but my team prevailed. And despite the signs, I sense this is a Norfolk crime at its heart.’

‘The hand was found up here, after all,’ Bloomfield pointed out. ‘St Cyr grew up here, lived here, ran all his businesses from his place at Abbottswood. I knew him through his charity work. Always took a keen interest in what I was up to in my role as head of the Drugs Task Force. He was surprisingly well informed for a man of his—’ He caught the Queen’s eye and coughed again. ‘Ahem . . . his generation. He let us use Abbottswood for meetings and events. It was obviously his home, not just some bolthole he used at weekends.’

‘I see.’ She wondered suddenly if the chief constable thought that one saw Sandringham as a bolthole. But surely not? So much of her family’s life was bound up in it.

‘Anyway, we’ll know a lot more when forensics make their report,’ he went on. ‘I expect they’ll give us an idea about what happened to him first and where the bag went in the water, too. It’s amazing how much they can deduce from temperature and tides. The cold weather helps, of course. If the hand had been in that plastic bag under a hot sun it would have been quite a different story.’ He saw the Queen’s bleak response to that last statement and sought to reassure her. ‘I’ve got fifty people working on this night and day. Whatever happened, ma’am, we’ll find it soon enough. I guarantee we’ll have it wrapped up for you as quickly as any force in the country.’

The Queen sensed a note of competition in his voice. Norfolk was not, on the whole, known for its speed and efficiency.