Murder of Gonzago Page 12

  ‘Roderick rang Gerard? Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. On his mobile.’

  ‘How terribly peculiar.’

  ‘We were on the terrace. Your late husband, Basil and I. Your late husband said, I am going to ring my brother now. He then said some truly awful things into the phone. It was terribly embarrassing for us, listening to his side of the conversation. Your late husband was showing off. He kept winking at us. He enjoyed having an audience.’

  ‘My late husband was the worst exhibitionist who ever lived.’

  ‘That night at dinner – the night he died. I still can’t believe the things he said.’ Sylvester-Sale shook his head. ‘About the glorious sixties and his escapades – that story about the debs and their jewels! What a cad! Poor you.’ He reached out and put his hand over hers. At long last!

  ‘It was horrid.’ She shut her eyes. ‘Horrid. In front of everybody! To be told that—’ She broke off. ‘I’ve never been so humiliated in my life. I felt debased. I didn’t know where to look. I truly wished him dead at that moment.’

  ‘Well, your wish was granted. He died an hour and a half later.’ Sylvester-Sale removed his hand.

  ‘Syl, there is something I … What if I told you …’

  ‘If you told me what?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing!’ If only I were sure he loved me, I would tell him the truth, she thought. ‘What exactly did Roderick say to Gerard on the phone?’

  ‘Some horribly personal things. Um. About Gerard’s singular lack of talent and enterprise. He referred to some incident in their childhood. He also asked Gerard to come and murder him.’

  ‘Murder him?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘What did he say exactly?’

  Sylvester-Sale cleared his throat. ‘Of course, dear boy, most of my earthly riches will be all yours to keep one day, no question about it, but you may have to wait some time – I may live to be a hundred, you know. Unless you kill me?’

  She laughed. ‘How spooky! You sound exactly like him!’

  ‘That would be a solution, yes, most definitely a solution. Why don’t you come over, dear boy? Hop on the next plane and pay us a visit, now why don’t you? Have it out with me? Challenge me to a duel! Show that you are a real Remnant? Well, you know where to find me.’

  22

  Nightmares and Dreamscapes

  The hands were round her throat now and the ghastly grinning face was very close to hers. She had seen the hands first and, even before the face revealed itself to her, she knew it was Lord Remnant’s.

  The coffin stood beside her bed, parallel to it. It was a white coffin and it gleamed in the dull glow of the moon, which gave her bedroom an unearthly appearance. She had seen the lid sliding open, slowly and without a sound. Then the hands showed, lit by the moon—

  Well, he knew how to do it. He had been reading about it; she had seen the ancient book on resurrecting the dead on his desk.

  Lord Remnant had come back from the grave.

  No, he hadn’t. He couldn’t have. He had never been inside a grave. He had been cremated. His ashes were in an urn somewhere at Remnant.

  She had recognized the hands. That was how she had known at once it was him. There was the nasty red weal between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, where Stephan had stabbed him.

  But—

  Louise Hunter woke up with a gasp. Her heart was racing.

  A dream. It was only a dream, thank God. She had had a bad dream. It was very early in the morning, pitch dark, raindrops drumming against the window panes, wind whining in the chimney –

  She got out of bed, making it creak horribly. She put on her dressing gown and then wrapped a blanket round her shoulders. Her teeth were chattering. She felt disoriented. Her ankles were swollen. We are no sooner aloft than we begin to feel gravity’s inevitable pull. It occurred to her that she was much cleverer than anyone ever realized.

  She stood beside the window. She thought she could just about distinguish the stunted trees writhing and struggling as if in agony.

  Suddenly she knew what it was that had been bothering her all this time.

  It had come back to her.

  There hadn’t been a weal on his hand when he died.

  Gerard Fenwick, who had also woken up early, sat at his desk, writing in his diary.

  A journey into the unknown, that’s what a novel should be. There is pleasure to be derived from following a novelist on a voyage of exploration, one in which the style reflects uncertainties, a novel written as if it were in answer to the question, ‘How do I know what I think till I see what I’ve said?’

  There is equal pleasure, if of a different order, that comes from a novelist who uses events not to change characters, but to reveal them. If one style, hesitating, probing, mazy, is suited to one kind of novel, then a different style, lucid, terse and epigrammatic, fits another.

  I have now tried everything, or almost everything. I have written in the plainest and most clichéd, weary man-of-the-world manner, such as Somerset Maugham’s. I have attempted Hemingway’s short, simple sentences, clear as a mountain stream. I have written in the style of a vacuous viscount out of Wodehouse. I have produced writing that is impossible to understand because it is oblique without really being very suggestive. I also have had the temerity to try to write like Monsieur Proust – in long, stately sentences, magnificently tortuous and full of qualifications – a style like a lush if overgrown garden full of unexpected delights.

  I have even started a modern version of one of those gloomy Greek dramas with the Eumenides lurking outside ready to make their entrance.

  The only intolerable style is one that draws attention to itself and distracts from the matter.

  For some reason I keep thinking of detective stories, maybe because of that bloody tape, though I don’t really see myself actually starting to write one. I hate the idea of formulas, which are as predictable as they are banal. In my opinion, detective stories of the ‘traditional’ kind do little more than repetitively tread their own sorry clichés.

  The setting: a cosy English village, a luxuriously exotic villa on a private island, or some decaying castle not unlike Remnant. A plot that depends on a certain person ordering scrambled eggs in the middle of the day, then slipping on discarded mandarin peel as a yellow Rolls roars by and certain other seemingly irrelevant accidents all aligning miraculously at the end.

  A highly unsympathetic victim, someone like my late brother, so that no reader should be tempted to weep for him. Suspects stumbling across the chessboard strictly according to the ‘rules of the game’. And finally the denouement in the library, which of course is a symbol of mankind’s futile search for mysteries. Why the library? Why not the stables or the wine cellar, the butler’s pantry or, for that matter, the bell tower?

  Slowly welling from the point of his gold nib, dark blue ink dissolved the question mark, for there his pen had stuck.

  ‘Bother,’ Gerard Fenwick said mildly.

  He had always found chronicles of cunningly contrived homicide disappointing, even when he was a boy. He remembered turning the last page of The Hound of the Baskervilles, thinking, what a rotten ending! The diabolical hound had been revealed as something little more diabolical than the original Dulux Dog. He had felt cheated!

  He also recalled a novel by one of the so-called ‘queens of crime’, he’d forgotten which one. It had been short but ponderous beyond belief. He couldn’t imagine anyone enjoying the experience of entering such a necropolis of ‘fine’ prose – unless one sought some kind of extase par la souffrance.

  The over-complicated plot had moved at a crippling crawl. There had been too many descriptions of mental processes, the vagaries of the weather and suchlike. In the end he had been quite unmoved to discover it was the unlikely duo of the ne’er-do-well stepbrother and the gruesome girl in the wheelchair who had killed the ghastly detective-story writer and then cut off his hands at the wrists.

  At Remnant Castle Claris
sa was woken by the ringing of her mobile phone.

  She turned on the bedside light and reached out for her mobile. Four thirty. Who the hell—? Suddenly she felt sick. Was this it? Was this the call she had been expecting?

  No. It was Stephan. Why wasn’t he asleep?

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘What’s the matter, darling?’

  ‘Where have you been, Mummy? I’ve been trying to call you for a long time. I’ve been trying and trying. Where have you been?’

  ‘I’ve been terribly busy. Can’t we talk later on, darling? It’s – it’s some unearthly hour—’

  ‘It’s a question of life and death, Mummy.’

  ‘You sound as though you haven’t taken your medicine, Stephan.’ Clarissa made an effort to appear calm. ‘Dr Mandrake told me he would make sure your sleep is the sleep of angels. Don’t they see to it that you take your pills and potions?’ She did her best to keep the exasperation out of her voice.

  He said he needed a smoke. Badly. He was desperate for a smoke. Couldn’t she smuggle some Mariá-Juana into Sans Souci? Please, Mummy.

  ‘It would be extremely difficult, darling.’

  ‘Put some in your handbag. No one will search you.’

  ‘Impossible, darling.’

  ‘Please, Mummy.’

  ‘No, darling. Out of the question.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Out of the question.’

  ‘You sound like Highgrove. I hate her and I hate you. I will kill myself, see if I don’t. Then you’ll be sorry,’ Stephan said.

  ‘I want you to go to bed, darling,’ she said. Why weren’t they monitoring him? Why wasn’t anyone with him? She was paying them a bloody fortune!

  ‘If you don’t bring me some Mariá-Juana, I will tell the police what I know,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell them what I saw. I saw you talking to the coachman.’

  ‘What coachman, darling?’

  ‘The black coachman who brought the coffin. The coffin with the Grimaud!’

  ‘Now listen to me, Stephan, I want you to go to bed—’

  ‘I am in bed. I saw you. You kept looking at your watch. You were expecting the coffin. Which means you know about the Grimaud. You know what I think? I think you arranged for the Grimaud to come to La Sorcière, so that it could kill Daddy R. Everybody thinks I killed Daddy R., but I didn’t. I’ve been remembering things, you see.’

  She listened.

  He had been in the garden. He had hidden in the bushes and watched from there. He told her what he had seen. He had seen the resplendent white hearse with the plumed horses carrying the white coffin with a surface as smooth as a mirror. The coffin had been lifted down by the coachman. A black giant, who handled the coffin single-handedly, with extreme care—

  ‘I saw you speak to the coachman, Mummy. You looked nervous. You kept looking round. Everybody else was in the house. They were with Daddy R., watching those boring home movies. It was obvious you were expecting the coach. But you forgot about me! I was in the garden.’

  ‘You seem to have got muddled up, darling,’ she said. She couldn’t think of anything else to say. ‘I believe you dreamt it.’

  But he was right. She had been expecting the coach. She would have preferred something unobtrusive, less conspicuous. The plumed horses and other theatrical flourishes had all been Roderick’s idea.

  She had instructed the coachman to leave the coffin inside the laundry room. The man had taken off his white topper. My condolences, madam. Quite absurd. She had given him a large tip. Perhaps the largest tip he had ever received in his entire life. She wasn’t worried the coachman would ever question why the coffin had been brought to La Sorcière or wonder about the reason it was placed inside the laundry. Lord Remnant’s eccentricities had been legendary.

  No one else had witnessed the arrival of the coach but Stephan …

  She had omitted to make sure Stephan was safely inside. One always tended to forget Stephan. Stephan so often moved in a zombified haze that one generally ignored him.

  ‘You must have dreamt it, darling,’ she said firmly. ‘It was one of your nightmares.’

  ‘I was curious, so I crept up to the laundry room and looked in through that tiny round window. I was curious about the coffin, you see. I wanted to take a proper look at it. The coach had left and you’d gone upstairs. I saw the coffin open and the Grimaud came out of it,’ Stephan said.

  As a rule Louise Hunter felt quite happy on Thursdays, more animated than on any other day of the week, because of London, but her broken night had left her listless, with an aching head and an instinctive shrinking from light. Familiar noises seemed amplified; the chirruping of birds outside the window, the ticking of the grandfather clock and the distant bleating of sheep all sounded distressingly piercing to her ears. She felt heavy and unwieldy; she might have been her own wax effigy – now wasn’t that a curious concept?

  ‘You are going to London, aren’t you? Your usual haunts?’ Basil had spoken from behind his Telegraph.

  ‘I don’t know. I am not sure,’ she said hesitantly in the hope that he would try to persuade her not to go, that he might suggest they did something together, something simple like going for a walk or doing the crossword, but he didn’t.

  Recklessly, she started buttering her fourth piece of toast. So much for her intention to go on a diet!

  ‘I am not sure,’ she repeated.

  ‘You love London,’ he said firmly. ‘Your week would be incomplete without your visit to London.’

  He wants to be rid of me, she thought. ‘Don’t you like the marmalade?’ She had seen him grimace.

  ‘It tastes a little odd—’

  ‘There is a sealed jar in the pantry.’ She started to rise. ‘I’ll get it for you.’

  ‘No, don’t bother. Please. Don’t fuss. I’ll survive.’ He gave a rueful smile. He poured himself a cup of coffee.

  She saw him glance towards the window. A longing kind of gaze. A gaze of glazed devotion. On a bright day one could see the spires of Remnant Castle from here. That woman! She would tear her apart if she could!

  ‘The coffee, on the other hand, is first class,’ he said.

  ‘I am so glad. I will order more of the same. It is a rather special kind of blend.’

  ‘Not Harrods, is it?’

  ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘That fellow mustn’t be encouraged.’

  ‘He mustn’t. Though I believe he sold Harrods to someone else.’

  ‘It’s a matter of principle.’

  ‘Of course it is. I completely agree,’ she said. ‘Shall I make you some more buttered soldiers?’

  ‘No, thank you. Don’t believe in gorging myself. Have you ever considered spending a day without eating?’

  ‘Do you think I should go on a diet?’ It was clear he found her fat. The thought plunged her into the depths of renewed depression and self-contempt.

  ‘Do you good, I should think.’ He rustled his paper. ‘Wouldn’t call it a diet. Not exactly.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘One whole day without eating. Perhaps two. Or three. Why not four?’ Basil Hunter went on, warming to his theme. ‘Thinking of giving it a try myself. Apparently one wakes up the next day bright as a button. Mental faculties a great deal sharper. Starving encourages the flow of extra blood to the brain.’

  ‘That’s what happens when you stand on your head,’ she said.

  He shook his teaspoon at her. ‘You will feel as though you are beginning to float away. And you find yourself laughing for no apparent reason.’

  ‘Sounds marvellous,’ Louise said. ‘Absolutely enthralling.’

  Two red spots had appeared on her cheeks and now she felt a surge of excitement. Why, this seemed like old times! They were having a conversation.

  Her joy, however, was short-lived. Basil failed to answer her question about the new heifer he had bought. He didn’t address her again and then she saw him gazing towards the window once more.

 
There was a silence.

  Louise helped herself to a Danish pastry. She sighed. How she wished she had a narrower gullet, if not a supermodel’s inhibited appetite. Her thoughts returned to her conversation with Stephan. Stephan claimed to have seen the Grimaud, the immaculately dressed homunculus that was said to turn up at the house of the doomed in a coffin.

  The Grimaud was a malevolent spirit, some Caribbeans said the Devil himself. The Grimaud had sleek black hair, three rows of teeth and burning red eyes. The Grimaud was conjured up by a man’s enemies and sent to his house to ‘claim’ him.

  Nonsense. All nonsense, she told herself. Stephan had been under the influence of heaven knew what cocktail of drugs. Stephan had been hallucinating. Stephan had been seeing things that hadn’t been there.

  Still, the fact remained that strange things had happened at La Sorcière on the day Lord Remnant died …

  How did one explain the hands? And how exactly did one account for the laughter?

  23

  Hands of a Stranger

  ‘There she is, the big girl at the far end, the table on the right. The vanquished Valkyrie.’ Payne pointed. ‘Gosh, look at that turban of trumpeting vermilion!’

  ‘Where? Oh yes. Goodness.’

  ‘She’s eating as though her life depends on it – what’s that she’s having? Blini? With dollops of what looks like blackcurrant jelly. I didn’t think I’d ever live to see such an outrage.’

  ‘I am large, I contain multitudes … Walt Whitman. Sorry. Perhaps she is terribly unhappy,’ Antonia said. ‘She’s drinking tea out of a saucer.’

  ‘I would be unhappy if I had to drink tea out of a saucer. Well, there you are, my love. The mighty Hunter is doing exactly what Hortense said she would be doing. It is clearly something of a ritual with her. This,’ Major Payne said didactically, ‘is what happens when people turn their backs on God.’

  ‘You don’t know if she’s turned her back on God.’