Earlier, just outside London, the hearse had to stop before it joined the motorway so police could take away blooms from the windscreen. The flowers made a poignant mound on the hard shoulder. Once inside the Althorp estate Diana was laid to rest quietly and privately on an island set in a lake. Her day was over.

News of the World
September 7, 1997

THERE WERE NOW some forty armoured cars, in various states of repair, and about a hundred mixed troops on rickshaws, mopeds, bicycles, motorbikes, invalid carriages and milkfloats. Fifteen horsemen wore the tattered uniforms of the Household Cavalry. They were spread out for almost thirty miles, with Jerry & Co. in the lead, creeping along the B604 to relieve the besieged manor of Althorp. The radio message had described a good-sized army of combined Reformed Monarchists, Conservative Republicans, Stuarts, Tudors, Carolines,Guillomites, New Harovians and Original Royalists, all united in their apostasy, their perverse willingness to diss the Madonna Herself. Camping around the walls like old queens.

"You hard girls. It's a conspiracy, isn't it?" Shaky Mo passed Trixi's dusted reefer back to her. "I call you The Cuntry. You are the country, aren't you? You're running it, really. The old girl network. Your mum's their role model. Our madonna's their goddess. A monstrous constituency. A vast regiment!"

"Keep mum." Jerry giggled into his bag. "Keep it dark. Under your hat. Close to your face."

Baroness Brunner began to cackle again. It was high-pitched. Some kind of alarm. Her hideous old eyes glared vacantly into his. "It's all in the cards, lad. All in the tea-leaves. Cards and tea-leaves made up my entire cabinet for a while. That way I could control the future."

"Wonky." Jerry twitched again. "It's going all wonky."

"I warned the wonkers." The old baroness sighed. Her work was over. She had no more energy. "Where am I? Can I say wonkers? I told them it would go wonky. You can't say I was wrong." Independent of her words, her teeth began to clack slowly and rhythmically. She drew a scented silk cushion to her face. In vivid threads, the cushion bore the standing image of the Blessed Diana, with a magnificent halo radiating from around her blonde curls, her arms stretched as if to hug the world in love, flanked by choirs of celebratory angels. There was some sort of Latin inscription, evidently embroidered by an illiterate hand.

Jerry watched her breaking up. She was in worse shape than he was. She had spent far too much energy trying to get her predictions to come true. It made a shadow of you in no time. It had been the death of Mussolini and Hitler. That's what made most presidents and prime ministers old before their time. Memory was the first thing to go. Which was embarrassing when you couldn't remember which secrets to keep.

Jerry sighed. There wasn't a lot of doubt. Things were starting to wind down again.

He shivered and drew up the collar of his mossy black car coat.