There were two large bowls of snowdrops in the Long Library when the chief constable arrived to explain the goings-on at Ladybridge. Seventy-two hours had passed since the removal of the body from the moat and the sudden death of the thirteenth Baron Mundy. He wondered how Her Majesty would take what he had to say. She must still be recovering from her bruising encounter in the field. The tale he had to tell was a gruesome one and he didn’t want to cause her any further distress, but these were friends of hers: she would want to know. It was why he wanted to tell her himself, so he could do it as delicately as possible.

He was shown in by one of the good-looking younger equerries, who told him the Queen had half an hour to give him before she needed to return to her guests. She swept in soon afterwards, in a tartan skirt and a cardigan, preceded by the dogs and accompanied by her APS. Her Majesty looked surprisingly chipper, he thought, for a woman who had been through such a terrifying encounter. This was encouraging. He noted the APS’s studied indifference to the equerry, meanwhile, and his to her, and wondered in passing who else knew they were sleeping together.

‘Chief Constable, I’m glad you’re here,’ the Queen said. ‘Do sit down, here by the window. And what do you have to tell me?’

Bloomfield couldn’t resist a little dig at a rival police force, who provided the protection officers. ‘I’m very sorry about what happened to you on Friday, ma’am,’ he said, settling in. ‘It must have been upsetting. The Met really should have looked after you more carefully.’

‘One is rarely upset, Chief Constable,’ the Queen said firmly. ‘I’m assured it won’t happen again. I must say, I wasn’t expecting to meet Hugh where I did.’

He realised he was being put in his place. ‘Erm, yes. I apologise. I know you’ve been very gracious about it.’

‘Let’s move on,’ she said. ‘Tell me, what have you found?’

Bloomfield nodded, grateful to be on more solid ground. ‘I understand Lord Mundy admitted to you that he killed his cousin. That must have been a terrible shock.’

‘The reason why is pretty obvious: Ned fathered his son.’

The Queen felt an odd duty to pass on the dead man’s own rebuttal of that particular charge.

‘Even so, it’s hard to imagine a man like Hugh going as far as to kill Ned for it,’ she suggested, curious to see his reaction.

As anticipated, Bloomfield brushed the words aside. ‘It’s a strong motive for murder, ma’am. Although to be fair, we don’t usually expect to see it in people of his . . . er . . . age.’

‘Even older people have strong feelings, Chief Constable.’

‘I suppose they do. But people don’t usually wait forty-eight years to act on them, ma’am. That’s what threw us off the scent, even when we knew about Valentine. The baron obviously did a lot of thinking in those forty-seven years. The death was the easy part. The hard part was the alibi. He must have been working on it for months. Once Mr Knight pointed out that we had no real proof Ned ever left the hall, everything else fell into place. With the exception of one stubborn witness. But that was quickly resolved.’

‘Mrs Capleton was the woman in question, ma’am. She’s the sort of person you can generally absolutely rely on. Churchwarden, stalwart of the WI. She was adamant Mundy had been with her all afternoon. But she rang us yesterday. We were already wondering about her by then. She’d had a crisis of conscience – something the vicar had said in church, apparently. Mundy had spun her a clever line.’

‘He’d appealed to her humanity. He popped round on Boxing Day and said he was in a spot of bother with his daughter. On the fourteenth of December he’d gone into Ely to “satisfy his manly urges”, he told her. I think that’s the way she put it. He was a widower, and he said he knew she would be sympathetic, which she was, but he didn’t think his family would understand. He swore her to secrecy and she felt she was doing the right thing by not betraying his trust. It never occurred to her that he might actually be the person we were looking for.’

‘I see. I didn’t know Ely was a hotspot for such activities,’ the Queen noted.

‘It isn’t, any more than anywhere else, ma’am. But she was hardly going to check that out. Meanwhile, he was letting himself into St Cyr’s house with the man’s own keys, using his phone and his computer to create the sense that St Cyr had been there, and packing a bag. We haven’t found much DNA at Abbottswood – not more than could be accounted for by a casual visit, which Mundy admitted to. But Mundy had ordered hairnets, plastic caps, surgical gloves, the works, on his computer. He had planned this, ma’am. Planned it down to the last detail. It’s the only way he could have done it. And he didn’t slip up once.