Murder Most Royal — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

There were links here to various newspaper articles about the scandal, which Rozie ignored. He was on the boards of various charities, two of which were anti-addiction and one that supported the welfare of refugees in Greece.

A subsequent search on Google Images brought up pictures of a tall, rangy man with skin the colour of milky tea, a sharp nose, ruddy cheeks and straight, bushy eyebrows over eyes as blue and piercing as the Queen’s.

In earlier pictures, Edward lounged moodily as a young man against bougainvillea-clad white walls, barefoot in bell-bottom jeans and faded T-shirts, accompanied by women in minidresses with Brigitte Bardot hair.

Later, alongside a variety of slim, blonde companions in tight-fitting dresses, he seemed to favour pink and purple jackets that were just this side of fancy dress.

By the most recent photographs, he seemed to have adopted the more relaxed country style of a waxed jacket over a denim shirt, a battered trilby hat and a fringed cotton scarf that brought out the colour of his eyes.

His face could look forbidding, accentuated by those eyebrows and prominent nose, but when he smiled, showing bright, white, un-British dentistry, he had a charisma that drew you instantly to him, even in the images where his hair had faded from burnished copper to spun gold.

In the latest photograph she could find, he was standing at the rear of an old Land Rover Defender, painted pink, with three dogs sitting in the back. He was resting his arm against the open door and the signet ring was clearly visible on the little finger of his left hand.

It made her shiver.

After supper, which the Queen ate in the dining room with her lady-in-waiting, Philip called down from his bed.

‘I hear Ned St Cyr has been chopped into pieces. What on God’s earth?’

He sounded utterly appalled, and slightly better.

‘Not exactly. They found one piece.’ The Queen was enjoying a post-prandial whisky in the saloon with her lady-in-waiting before going up to bed herself. Who had told him? Gossip spread among the staff like wildfire and tended to mutate like Chinese whispers.

Goodness knew what they were saying in the servants’ hall.

‘D’you remember that white ball he and Patrick did here for your mother?’

The Queen did. It was in the early sixties, when they still saw him on a regular basis. Ned must have been in his late teens, no more, but he and his uncle Patrick were already in partnership as party organisers to the gentry in about five counties.