Wrong Body: A Sandringham Mystery

By Andrew Ogden

1940 and in the skies over England, the Battle of Britain is raging. A Luftwaffe Dornier 17 bomber is shot down and crashes into the North Sea off the coast of Norfolk, a single parachute floating down. The bodies of three other crew are eventually recovered from the sea.

 

To the present, and In Berlin a young brother and sister strike lucky on the lottery and decide to fulfil a long family promise: to bring the body of their great-grandfather back to Germany from his resting place in a quiet war grave in the corner of an ancient Norfolk church.

 

Meanwhile, a gamekeeper is found shot dead at a charity clay pigeon shoot on the Royal Sandringham Estate. Our unlikely protagonist photographer Mark Elwin is on hand to record both events and to unravel the mysteries they both throw up.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Nov 7, 2025
• ISBN: 9781037111723

Andrew Ogden

Andrew Ogden had a twenty year career as a journalist and broadcaster for both the BBC and ITV before setting up his own media company, Broadcast Media Services Ltd (BMS). He has four children and a dog called Dave and lives in Norfolk. Also, by this author: Finding Alfie: A Sandringham Mystery.

Book preview

About the Author

Andrew Ogden had a twenty year career as a journalist and broadcaster for both the BBC and ITV before setting up his own media company, Broadcast Media Services Ltd (BMS). He has four children and a dog called Dave and lives in Norfolk.

Also, by this author: Finding Alfie: A Sandringham Mystery.

Dedication

To my children Ben, Max, Charlie and Imogen—who also designed the book cover.

Copyright Information©

Andrew Ogden 2025

The right of Andrew Ogden to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781037111716 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781037111723 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2025

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

Thanks to David Stilgoe for proofreading and assistance with historical rural matters.

To Detective Sergeant Michael Hardiman of the Norfolk Constabulary for assistance with police procedure.

And to Jamie Heffer, Chairman of the excellent RAF Bircham Newton Heritage Centre, for wartime operational expertise.

Chapter 1

Norfolk

Present Day

There are lots of people who love to hear the sound of guns going off.

Shotguns, in particular.

They experience pure exhilaration in the simple act of pulling a trigger, the noise of the blast of gunpowder, the kick of the stock against a shoulder, the thrill of the kill as a pheasant crumples in the sky and falls to the ground, the warmth of hearing someone shout ‘great shot’.

On this particular day, there were more than two hundred of those people all gathered in a corner of the Royal Sandringham estate in northwest Norfolk. But, for today at least, the pheasants and partridges of the county were safe. For one thing, it was August and the season for shooting game birds had yet to begin.

For another, this was a gathering at the Royal Clay Ground, clay-pigeon shooting by kind permission of His Majesty King Charles III, precisely as it said on the ticket for the day.

Every year, a couple of dozen teams of four guns gather for the charity event organised by the local gun auction house. The vast array of gear required was brought by lorry from a big clay-pigeon shooting outfit in Suffolk but the day was patrolled by the cohort of Sandringham estate gamekeepers, all dressed in identical tweed shooting suits, personalised only by their own choice of socks, pulled up to the knee and held in place by bow-tied tassels.

People who like the sound of guns going off are not one type, and certainly not all braying toffs in tweeds as sometimes portrayed in Sunday evening popular television dramas like Downton Abbey.

Most of the teams on display on this particular warm August Friday were anything but toffs. The Squelders team, for instance, were two scaffolders and two welders who had won last year’s competition, missing just three shots all morning.

These jobbing builders and engineers were serial competition-goers, practising twice a week at a shooting centre just outside Bolton and entering charity clay shoots up and down the country. But this one, the Sandringham shoot, was the big one as far as they were concerned. It was, by association at least, royal.

Dad’s Army were four men in their early eighties who had been friends since school days and who had been beaters together for the Duke of Rutland at the Belvoir Castle shoot in Leicestershire for forty years. Only when the sheer physicality of a day beating got too much had they packed it in.

During their beating years they were unable to afford to shoot live game birds, so they shot clays and soaked up the atmosphere of the actual game bird shoot days by walking the beaters’ line, flushing out birds for others with much deeper pockets to shoot.

One day a year, which they treasured more than any other, was in late January when the Duke reversed their roles and the Duke and his friends walked the beaters’ line and let the beaters have a chance to shoot any excess cock birds.

Team Deloitte Delight were four female executives from the City accountancy firm. They’d never shot until the week before when they’d had a joint lesson somewhere in Surrey, but their entry, plus two nights at a swanky hotel near Burnham Market, was a corporate reward for a job well done, preparing the accounts for one of the big four UK construction companies. The actual guns on the day had been loaned by the organisers.

Team Rick O’Shea were just a bunch of blokes from the villages around Sandringham out for a day’s fun. They had no expectation of winning but were up for a day of ‘fun with a gun’ as they called it. That, and the long, boozy lunch to follow. A wife or two would be coming to collect them.

And it went on. A couple of dozen teams of four ranging from competition class shots to London corporate executives—some shooting, some entertaining valued clients—to local yokels and everything in between. They were all out to shoot clay pigeons nominally with the honourable motive of supporting charity, but in reality because the day was ‘with kind permission of His Majesty King Charles III’ and who could resist that brush with royalty itself.

Mark Elwin was there for a very different reason: money.

His photographic professional portfolio, of course, included the bread and butter of weddings and taking the portrait photos of unenthusiastic kids from several schools in the county. He also had a lucrative sideline in aerial drone photography, mostly for the proud owners of second homes, the million pound mansions strewn along the north Norfolk coast. All very well and good photographic enterprises, and all money making.

But these days, Mark Elwin only really got excited about two things. The main one was when he got a very occasional commission from a newspaper to go out and do some old-fashioned press photography. He anticipated those days with the same passion as he had done in his early twenties when he saw himself as a trailblazing photo journalist, that brief period of youthful ambition cut short by pregnancy, marriage, another pregnancy and divorce.

The other thing that actually made him want to pick up his camera was easy money, and the shooting game was awash with money. Every year from September 1st to February 1st he would fill his diary with as many shoot days as he could.

Many of them were at the big Norfolk country estates: Holkham Hall, the home of the Earl of Leicester; Houghton Hall, the grand summer palace of the Cholmondeley family; that of Earl Spencer, uncle to the future King William, and even some of the lesser estates at Ken Hill, Sedgeford and Holme.

A day out shooting partridge and pheasant could cost upwards of two thousand pounds these days. For each gun. There were usually nine or even ten guns. When corporate clients were being entertained at the estates, blasting away into the sky, with the body corporate paying for it, that body corporate would want all their guests to have a souvenir of the day, and not just the standard issue of a brace of dead pheasants.

So, the shoot organisers offered the corporate clients not only lashings of champagne and a cordon bleu lunch, they paid Mark Elwin a generous fee to produce glossy souvenir brochures. These brochures were packed with group shots of pre-shooting glasses of sloe gin and champagne, mixed, of course, in the local Norfolk way.

Drinking started at about half past eight in the morning, with a bacon sandwich or two, which Mark Elwin captured for posterity. Then he would add panoramas of the estate and the big house, and then lots of action shots of the guns, looking resplendent and occasionally awkward in often newly-bought tweed suits of breeks and jackets. It was good money for the photographer, the cost of which had already been added, and indeed more, to the price charged to the estate’s client.

Yes, Mark Elwin had a very, very profitable sideline in photographing shoot days. With his assistant Trish he would take photographs on the ground and in the air from Mark’s latest toy, the very top-of-the-range drone camera. When the day was done, the birds were counted and laid out a brace at a time in front of the gun trailer.

Mark would then gather up the guns, the hosts and the head gamekeeper and line them up with their dead birds for a final group shot. Then Mark and Trish would head back to his photographic shop, Visionary, on the high street of the nearby village of Dersingham.

It really was a terrible name for a shop, but it was one which he had inherited when he had bought the business some twenty years earlier. A despised name but one which he had never got round to changing.

Within twenty-four hours the two of them, Mark and Trish, could set the pictures into the templates, hit the computer buttons and set the printers whirring overnight. The next morning they would get the binders chopping and folding and, hey presto, the glossy brochures were finished to perfection and delivered back to the estate office where they were sent out to their guests of the previous day.

Within a couple of days, post had been delivered and there they were, ready to be laid out on coffee tables in Kensington flats and Mayfair mews, all to impress friends.

There would be no drone filming today. Royal Protection Police rules were very specific. Nothing was allowed that could identify the precise location of the Royal Clay Ground and certainly no drones that could race away and film the Sandringham estate more generally.

So today Mark was operating solo. Anyway, Trish had a wedding to photograph tomorrow and there were always last-minute changes demanded, usually from the bride’s mother.

Yes, today was a regular day in that Mark was filming people who were having an absolute ball, pointing guns and making a noise. But it was an even better day for the Mark Elwin finances. Instead of there being one client and ten guns, here were more than a couple of dozen teams, a hundred or so guns, plus guests, some of which, in fact, many of which, would want a glossy album to remind them of the day they shot clays ‘by kind permission of His Majesty King Charles III’.

Mark had arrived early. He’d left his shop well before the bustle on the high street and was on site to liaise with Nick Percival, who was the principal organiser of the day and a director of Percival’s Auctioneers. Percival’s had its gun warehouse on the Sandringham estate and had specialised in selling guns, trophies and militaria for three generations.

Even though the day’s sport was only clay pigeons, it was still £2000 to enter a team of four but you did get a pretty generous level of alcohol, a bacon sandwich to start the day, a lunch and complimentary 12-bore or 20-bore cartridges to blast away with.

Everything from the marquee to the food and drink was corporately sponsored, so the money going to charity was maximised. There was an auction of more corporate gifts after lunch, when the free booze made people much more likely to bid silly money for something they didn’t really know that they had even wanted.

This year there were two charities approved by His Majesty, the Gurkha Welfare Trust and a fund towards repairs at the local Sandringham church, St Mary Magdalene, the one famously attended by the royal family on Christmas day.

Mark Elwin and Nick Percival had known each other since village primary school, and even though Nick had gone off to public school in the Midlands at the age of eleven, the two had remained friends during school holidays. When Mark had first approached his old friend to cover the Sandringham charity clay shoot some ten years earlier, to take his photographs and sell his brochures, Nick had said that would be fine and he didn’t even ask for a fee.

Wotcher, said Nick when he saw Mark picking his way through the trees and making for the huge marquee, which would be where the guns would gather for early morning slugs of champagne and sloe gin, glass in one hand and a hefty bacon sandwich in the other. A shoot day, even a clay shoot day, and especially a fancy one like today, was fuelled by alcohol and food.

You okay? said Mark.

Yes, oh yes, oh yes, said Nick. Everything is fine, and what a day for it! Thirty degrees Celsius and not a breath of wind. I see the Sandringham gamekeepers have been excused jackets, he said, pointing to a group of about a dozen men all kitted out in Sandringham tweed livery. Nevertheless, said Nick, tweed breeks on a day like this. That’ll keep them warm!

It’s what everyone wants though, isn’t it? said Mark. Pageantry. A whiff of royal. Where can I dump my gear?

I’ve got an ‘office tent’ behind the bacon butty van, you can stow it there. Come on, I’ll give you a hand.

The two of them picked up a metal flight case each and padded off.

Fancy a sloe gin? said Nick. Bacon roll?

I’m working, not shooting. Not a gun anyway, said Mark. I’ll leave the heavy drinking to those with lethal weapons in their hands, and the two men laughed.

It was a fact, a rite, a ritual, that days shooting guns were laced with copious amounts of alcohol. Sloe gin, or champagne, or, of course, both was the traditional starter, although some preferred bulls blood, a kind of glorified beef stock and vodka confection.

Champagne featured heavily at all times in the day and definitely at elevenses. Hip flasks were liberally passed around. Another local delicacy was Norfolk Nog, a half whisky-half Baileys creamy confection. It was a lethal mix, especially when it joined everything else that had been poured into a stomach.

Mark would cover eight or nine shoot days a season and he was never anything but amazed that alcohol and loaded guns were mixed so freely but never once in his lucrative career selling glossy souvenir coffee table albums had he ever seen anyone hurt in a shooting accident.

Until that day.

Chapter 2

Norfolk

Present Day

Mark’s day had started with his usual domestic routine. He always got up first, then pulled up his pyjama bottoms, pulled on a t-shirt, and a jumper in the winter, went downstairs, put the kettle on, then he took Emma and himself a cup of tea back upstairs and snuggled back in bed next to her.

Morning sweetheart, he said, as he always did.

Morning, she said and turned on her side and threw an arm across his chest, as she always did.

Mark and Emma had been together for a couple of years and had moved into a smart three-storey Victorian terraced house in Hunstanton just six months earlier. Mark had sold one of his houses in King’s Lynn, part of his little portfolio of two-bedroomed rental terraced town houses he’d been steadily building up during his long bachelor years. Emma had sold her cottage in Dersingham, which she and her daughter Daisy had moved into after the divorce.

Daisy was now nearly 15 and occupied the top floor of the house, a bedroom, a spare bedroom for sleepovers and a little shower room. Entry into the teenager’s lair was strictly forbidden. Instructions to turn down the music were to be sent by text.

Every now and again Emma would notice that there was a serious lack of cups and plates in the kitchen and would be forced to do a daytime raid on the third floor to rescue the used crockery from under her daughter’s bed. Why, thought Emma, would you not simply bring it downstairs and put it in the dishwasher?

Raids on the third floor were always followed by howls of despair when Daisy got home from school.

Why have you been going through my stuff, Mum? Again? she would complain quite loudly.

Well, if you brought your dirty pots— Emma started patiently, but got no further.

Don’t ever, ever, go through my stuff again! said Daisy, again, quite loudly and at that point, she would flounce off—and flounce was the right word—dramatically and close the door behind her. Quite loudly.

It was funny because her behaviour at home was in stark contrast to her behaviour in the Visionary photographic shop.

Daisy had started doing a little summer holiday job when Mark and Emma had first got together. Working mostly with Trish, she would bag up and label envelopes containing school photos, always taken at the end of the school year. Daisy would fill up the inkwells on the commercial printers at the back of the shop, load up paper, even make the tea and hoover the floor, things which would have sparked a volcanic response if it had ever been suggested in a domestic setting.

Now that she was a little older, she had started going with Trish on Saturday wedding shoots, acting as her assistant, loading up the gear at the shop, feeding it into the Visionary estate car, unloading at the other end and generally acting as Trish’s dogsbody.

From giving her twenty pounds a day as a youngster, Mark had now put her on the books and paid her the minimum wage. In the summer school holidays she worked three days a week as that was prime wedding season and she was, without doubt, a very professional and able young woman.

A week or so earlier Trish had leant over the back to back desks she and Mark shared in their office at the back of the shop and looked at him in a conspiratorial way.

You do know Daisy has asked me to teach her about the cameras, and photographic techniques and the editing software? The whole business really? Has she talked to you about it? said Trish.

Mark said Daisy certainly hadn’t talked to him about it. That evening, he asked Emma and Emma confirmed that Daisy hadn’t mentioned it to her either.

Well, said Mark. You know, I’ve been thinking about it on the way home and I think it’s not a bad idea.

Won’t that get in the way of Trish and her work? said Emma.

It’ll take a little bit of Trish’s time, for sure, but Trish is so super-efficient, it shouldn’t make the slightest difference to actually getting things done. And Trish wants to do it. So, I say, let them both give it a go. In fact, the sooner Daisy can frame a shot and can press a trigger, the sooner I can get out of going to weddings altogether!

Mark and Daisy were as good a step-father and step-daughter relationship as Mark and his own two children had been very poor father and son and father and daughter relationships.

Mark’s ex-wife, Sally, had remarried nearly fifteen years ago and his contact with his children had been sporadic at best. His work meant photographing weddings a lot of Saturdays, so regular, scheduled parental weekends were out of the question and a lot of the corporate game bird shooting days were on Saturdays in the winter too.

After a bit of early effort the contact between Mark and his children had just about dried up apart from a couple of tense holidays to Center Parcs and polite requests for financial contributions.

The one thing that Mark had always done was pay his dues. Maintenance payments were always paid on time. Extra contributions asked for school trips were always made and he was now wondering if he was going to be asked for money for his daughter Beth’s wedding.

She was 21 now, newly engaged and living in London. The wedding was a little way off, so there had been no request for funds just yet. She had recently texted him ‘just to let you know’. Would he be asked to do the traditional thing and help pay for it? Would he even be invited?

His son Tim he did see from time to time, usually in a local pub. At eighteen, Tim had decided against the debt burden of university and was now a newly qualified and busy jobbing electrician. When they did bump into each other Mark always bought him, and any of his mates, a beer and they’d ask each other a few pleasantries. How’s your mum? How’s work? That sort of thing. And then they’d go their separate ways again.

But in the two years since Mark and Emma had got together, he and Daisy had actually grown to be quite good chums. Daisy was always included, never resented, and while Mark didn’t fully adopt a role in loco parentis—he most certainly did not go to school parents’ evenings—he would, nevertheless, help with homework and chip in for Daisy’s clothes and school trips.

Emma still only worked part-time, ten until two, as an office administrator at an accountancy firm and didn’t earn much. It was a legacy from her days as a single mum. She loved the discipline of having to get up and go in. She treasured the small measure of financial independence it gave her.

So, that morning, the day started with tea and a cuddle. As usual. And the day ended with the discovery of the dead body of a Sandringham gamekeeper. Not as usual.

Chapter 3

Norfolk

Present Day

Getting the most out of the Sandringham charity clay shoot day—and by that Mark meant the most money—was an exercise in planning and routine rather than any artistic ambitions.

There were, he was told by Nick Percival, twenty-five teams of four. He had, he said, hoped for more. So, at the very least, Mark needed to get twenty-five team shots and tick them off his paper list that Nick Percival had given him. The team leader’s name and email address was also on the sheet and that would be used by Trish and Daisy to let them know when the souvenir glossy books were available.

More than just the team photo, he needed at least one shot of each of the guns standing proud, gun broken over a shoulder or better still, gun in the air, a clay exploding in the big blue Norfolk