Murder Most Royal — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

His mother’s buried at Ladybridge and it meant he could go and visit her, which was more important to him than he let on, I think. He tried to reach out to everyone, really. And he wanted rewilding to put north Norfolk on the map.’

‘I rather thought Sandringham did that,’ Philip observed.

‘I bet they were,’ Philip muttered.

‘Did he really just disappear?’ Eugenie asked.

Astrid nodded. ‘I wasn’t worried at first. I kept thinking I was about to see him any second. I rang his mobile from the airport. He’d warned me it might be out of power, which it was, so I rang Abbottswood .

 . . the same. There isn’t a landline at the flat. I was kind of pissed off with him then. Which is just so . . . kind of . . . tragic now.’

‘No, it’s understandable,’ Beatrice agreed. ‘So what happened?’

This was ‘being helpful’, the Queen assumed.

‘I got a taxi to the house and I was so sure he’d be in the kitchen, making supper and sorry for forgetting. But he wasn’t there. The dogs were howling. The sitting room was completely trashed and I assumed there must have been burglars .

 . . I had the most awful, awful visions, but it was just the dogs. Ned must have forgotten to shut the kitchen door properly and he hadn’t put their toys out for them. Gwennie goes absolutely crazy without her bunny. And they were starving, poor things.’

‘Had he just left them for all that time?’ Eugenie asked. She, too, was a dog person.

The Queen had been wondering about this. She knew it was absolutely not the most important thing, but surely he hadn’t just abandoned them?

Astrid stopped suddenly.

Had her facial muscles been able to express emotion, it would have been dismay. The Queen felt slightly guilty she had underestimated the strength of the bond between Ned and his young fiancée. There was real affection there, and a sense of common purpose. She knew how that felt.

‘It must be very difficult,’ she sympathised.

Astrid nodded. ‘It helps that I have the dogs. They miss him as much as I do.

Gwennie, she’s the setter – he always has one to remind him of his mother – she won’t be consoled. She just lies there, looking at me. They all know something’s wrong.’

Several pairs of royal eyes looked at Astrid sympathetically, because they completely got it about the dogs.

‘Did he seem stressed out?’ Beatrice asked.

‘No! But I guess he must have been. Maybe he was trying to hide it from me. I mean, I know he had a lot on his mind.