Murder Most Royal — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

However, he wasn’t at Stansted Airport to meet his fiancée that afternoon. She couldn’t get hold of him, so she reported him missing the next day, which by then was the sixteenth, eight days ago. We weren’t unduly worried because he was known to go off grid occasionally. People go missing more often than you might think, ma’am.’

‘Oh, I know,’ the Queen said. She was familiar with the statistics, which were grim. It was alarming to discover how many of those who were subsequently found had good reasons for staying away.

‘Of course, this identification casts a new light on everything,’ Bloomfield said. ‘The Maserati’s still parked outside the flat; the friends have heard nothing; St Cyr’s phone hasn’t been used since he first went up to London. There’s no record of him leaving the country. We’re confident the DNA analysis will confirm the hand is his.’

‘Oh, dear. Does anyone at Abbottswood have any light to shed on what happened?’

‘No, ma’am. Mr St Cyr lived alone, unless his fiancée was visiting.

There’s a cleaning lady who comes in three times a week, a local cook who obliges on request, and a groundsman who lives in the gatehouse, but he wasn’t there.’

The Queen nodded. A few decades ago, a place like Abbottswood would have bristled with servants, but it didn’t surprise her that Ned might rattle round his house these days. 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.