Murder of Gonzago Read online

  ‘That indeed is so,’ he agreed. ‘I must confess to a peculiar taste for sudden and isolated luxuries. I am particularly susceptible to a certain rather exclusive type of macaroon one can get only at Fortnum’s.’

  ‘This is a matter of life and death, Ducky. So they – these people – accept the hush money, they allow themselves to be bribed, but as a result some of them lose their peace of mind. They are unable to sleep. They feel as though they might explode. They feel alienated from their surroundings. Nothing seems to make sense any more. They start popping pills—’ Hortense broke off. ‘I am sure I am putting things rather badly, but I hope you get the picture? The point, Ducky, is that the victim deserved to die.’

  The Revd Duckworth blinked. ‘Is there – was there – a victim?’

  Hortense Tilling’s gently wrinkled face was quite flushed now. ‘The victim didn’t possess a single redeeming feature. The Don Giovanni aria got it all wrong!’

  ‘What aria?’

  ‘La nobiltà ha dipinta negli occhi l’onestà.’

  ‘The nobility – um – has honour painted in their eyes?’

  ‘Honesty. The nobility has honesty painted in their eyes. Well, Ducky, this particular nobleman was far from honest. He was devious. He led a life of decadence and depravity. He was arrogant, egocentric and cruel. He talked of selling his soul to the Devil!’

  ‘I can’t help the feeling,’ the Revd Duckworth said slowly, ‘that you are talking of someone you know.’

  ‘He enjoyed upsetting people. He liked to say hurtful things, awful things. He had an extremely nasty sense of humour. He was an unregenerate bully. He was a mental sadist.’ She had started talking very fast. ‘He got kicks out of seeing people in tears – especially women. He had a thing about women. Not a nice thing. He treated women very badly indeed. Both wittingly and unwittingly.’

  ‘Dear me!’

  ‘One particularly outrageous act he committed unwittingly. However, it is my conviction that even if he had realized the enormity of what he was about to do, he would still have done it. He was that kind of man, yes. Therefore he deserved to die.’

  ‘Who’s this person? A nobleman, did you say? My dear Hortense, you are not by any chance talking about—’

  ‘No!’ She reached out and covered his mouth with her hand. ‘Not another word, Ducky! No, don’t speak! Please, no! No more questions. Toute verité n’est pas bonne à dire. But one thing I will say. The murder was entirely justified. This particular murderer does not deserve punishment. I assure you this particular murderer did the right thing.’

  Tears had sprung in her eyes. She sniffed. She glanced up, at Stephan Farrar’s photograph.

  How terrible not to be able to tell the truth!

  4

  Insomnia

  So that’s that, Louise Hunter thought. It’s all over. No one will ever know now. What a relief. Thank God for cremations. Obliteration of all the vital evidence. Of all evidence. Reduced to cinders, ashes, amen. Unless someone broke down and confessed, the truth would never be known.

  I can’t believe we agreed to it, she thought.

  They had let Clarissa persuade them. Basil hadn’t hesitated a moment. He’d said yes to her proposition at once. Yes, yes and yes again. Basil was in thrall to Clarissa.

  Louise had dreaded hearing a voice calling the proceedings to a halt, commanding the coffin be pulled back and opened. Some plain-clothes policeman showing his badge and asking them all to leave the crematorium and stand outside while they checked Lord Remnant’s body.

  Augustine had been the only servant there when Lord Remnant had been killed, but he might have told the other two – what were those two noisy black women called? Caresse and Sandra Dee. Both of them seemed to be married to Augustine. The three of them seemed to live together. Trios like that appeared to be common enough on the island of Grenadin. A legacy from the long years of slavery, no doubt.

  Lord Remnant’s body had been taken away very fast. Basil and Dr Sylvester-Sale had carried him to his bedroom upstairs. Augustine had been talking about ‘the Master having a fit’. It had taken him some time to realize his master was dead, or that was the impression he had given. He had then broken down and cried like a child.

  Louise was relieved to be back in England, but at the moment her mind was enshrouded in profound depression. She looked out of the window – at the dreary grey skies that presaged rain. Basil had insisted on taking the dogs out. He said he needed fresh air. The real reason, of course, was that he didn’t want to be with her.

  The night before, she had decided to sleep with her feet away from the wardrobe since she had become convinced that the late Lord Remnant would emerge from the wardrobe, stretch out his hands and drag her in – back into hell, with him. She’d got it into her head that the wardrobe was in fact the gateway to hell.

  The thought of those pale limp hands, last glimpsed crossed over the dead body, closing round her ankles made her shudder. According to some legend or other, male Remnants rarely found peace in death and tended to come back …

  She had slept badly. She had had the most appalling nightmares, through which she had tossed and turned and sweated in horror; nightmares exploding with strange flaring lights and fires and the terrible cries of people being burnt alive. She had woken up hearing herself scream, and as she had come to her senses, she heard someone laugh, a triumphant kind of laugh. She was certain it had been Lord Remnant.

  She and Basil had had separate bedrooms for quite some time now. She wondered if her irrational fantasies might have something to do with her husband’s refusal to share a bed with her …

  Louise sat at her dressing table. The mirror showed a moon-shaped face surrounded by carefully arranged auburn hair – formless features – emotional gold-brown eyes. Her expression managed to be at once neutral and unrestrained. She lacked allure. Perhaps she should dye her hair blonde and start doing it differently – over the ears, in sibylline coils? No – her face was too puffy. She had a double chin. How she hated herself!

  She had too many curves and protuberances. She should lose weight. She should take up skipping, or perhaps she should stop eating altogether. She felt a hot tear roll down her cheek. Inconsequentially, she remembered reading somewhere that cures for melancholy included ballroom dancing and scourging.

  For some reason she couldn’t get Lord Remnant’s hands out of her head. There was something about Lord Remnant’s hands that troubled her …

  The day Lord Remnant had died, 25 February, had become a watershed in her and Basil’s lives, a line of demarcation, or a point in time, rather, before which the world seemed to glow with a patina of innocence and clarity, contentment and health. Since then everything had turned murky and tortured and incomprehensible, bearing nothing but portents of greater darkness to come.

  Louise had been to London the day before. It hadn’t been her day for London, but there was something she needed to do. A couple of things, actually. It would have been unwise to go to a local post office. Her lips twitched into a smile. She could be quite clever when she put her mind to it!

  Lord Remnant’s hands – why did she keep thinking about Lord Remnant’s hands? As though she didn’t have enough on her mind! Well, they were the hands of a nobleman. Clean, well-tended, meticulously manicured, smooth. She couldn’t say what it was about them that filled her with such unease.

  In some dim corridor of her mind the nebulous importance of the hands grew and grew …

  * * * *

  Dr Sylvester-Sale was on the telephone, talking in his low, well-modulated voice.

  ‘I couldn’t call you because I didn’t have my mobile with me. I’d left it at home. These things happen. I am really sorry. No, I am not lying. You’re not crying, Clarissa, are you? Oh God.’

  ‘You could have stayed with me. I needed you. The moment you disappeared, I felt unsafe. The ground shook under my feet. I can’t live without you, Syl. No sanctuary left, I kept thinking. No sanctuary.’

&nbs
p; ‘I couldn’t stay with you. You know I couldn’t.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you? Why?’

  ‘It would have caused comment.’

  ‘So what? I don’t care! Do you? Do you?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I do, Clarissa. We agreed that we needed to be careful, didn’t we? Better to play it safe for a while … What was that? No, I am not going to “abandon” you, you silly girl.’ He glanced at his watch.

  ‘You intend to go off with one of your adoring lady patients, why don’t you admit it? You have a mistress. I am sure you have a mistress. She’s with you now, isn’t she? Some clever young girl. You like clever young girls.’

  ‘Now, listen carefully, Clarissa – take one of the sachets I gave you. It will calm you down at once. It’s getting rather late, so hop into bed. No, I am not trying to poison you. I am not trying to get rid of you. Do be sensible.’

  ‘Please, Syl – can you – can you come now? I need to see you. I must see you.’

  ‘I am sorry but that would be quite impossible.’

  ‘We must talk. About us. About the future.’

  ‘We are talking now.’

  ‘I can’t live without you.’

  ‘Apparently people kept ringing while I was away, leaving messages. I am under a lot of pressure. Hell of a lot to do.’ Heaven give me strength, he thought. ‘My secretary has been finding it incredibly difficult to cope. Devil of a backlog … No, I don’t feel greater sympathy for my secretary than for you. No, I am not having an affair with my secretary. Do try to understand – no, you can’t come to see me. I won’t open the door,’ he said desperately. ‘No, Clarissa. No. Out of the question.’

  ‘You are trying to get rid of me. You said once that I was given to emotional extremism.’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘You did! You would like nothing better than to be shot of my leech-like devotion, why don’t you admit it?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Clarissa, pull yourself together … What was that about Stephan?’ Sylvester-Sale held the receiver closer to his ear. ‘No, he needs to stay there,’ he said firmly.

  ‘He is dreadfully unhappy. He hates the food. He hardly eats anything. He wants to know when he can come home. He keeps asking, “When can I come home, Mummy?” He sounds desperate. When will they release him? When will he be able to come home?’

  ‘I don’t know. It all depends how well he responds to treatment. They know what they are doing, I assure you. Sans Souci is one of the best places, if not the best.’

  ‘Sans Souci costs squillions. It’s incredibly expensive. Incredibly. For a loony bin.’

  ‘Sans Souci is not a loony bin.’

  ‘It’s more expensive than the Taj Mahal … More expensive than the Empire State Building … More expensive than Windsor Castle … And so much more expensive than the Kremlin.’ She giggled.

  ‘I hope you haven’t been drinking, Clarissa.’

  ‘I am having a little drinkie.’

  ‘You are a bad girl,’ he said wearily. ‘You promised you were not going to touch the stuff.’

  ‘I am in pain – in deep searing pain. I miss you terribly, Syl. I can’t live without you. If you leave me, I’ll kill myself. I am going to take an overdose.’

  ‘The Sans Souci staff are extremely efficient. The best specialists in the land,’ he said. ‘The rooms are airy and tastefully decorated. They have a cordon bleu chef—’

  ‘Life without you is not worth living.’

  ‘They know exactly what should be done for Stephan. Stephan will be all right, so there is absolutely no call for you to worry.’

  ‘What if he talks about what happened? You know he lacks any instinct for self-preservation. What if he tells everybody about it? He can’t be trusted to control his tongue … I mean the murder, Syl. What else could I possibly mean? What if he starts saying it was he who killed his stepfather?’

  ‘No one will take it seriously.’ Sylvester-Sale spoke reassuringly. ‘They are used to the wildest talk at these places … Sorry? Who’s accusing you? What bloody nonsense is that? You have had – an anonymous letter?’

  He is going to leave her. He told me so last night. Clarissa never meant anything to him. He was bored, that was the only reason he started the affair. Also because he hated her husband. It was a form of revenge. He admitted he had made a mistake. It is me he loves. He told me I made his life worth living.

  Clarissa is cunning like a fox, seductive like a she-cat and cold like a snake. She is obsessed with Syl. How she kept staring at him! She seems to have thrown all caution to the winds. That old boy at the funeral, Sir Gyles Napier, said Clarissa had been the sweetest girl when he first met her twenty years ago. Innocence personified. Sugar and spice and all things nice. Is that possible?

  What’s that in my pocket? God, why do I keep carrying it about? No one saw me pick it up … The Remnant coat of arms and his initials are on it … Couldn’t be more damning!

  He’s always been nice to me. Exceptionally nice. Always so kind and encouraging.

  If I had been a different sort of person, I could have started blackmailing him …

  What was he doing standing on the terrace outside the french windows at the time of the murder? What was he doing in Grenadin?

  5

  Travels With My Aunt

  Lady Grylls and Major Payne were on their way to the Fenwicks’ house in Belgrave Square, where they were expected by Felicity Fenwick, or Lady Remnant, as she had now become.

  ‘I hate driving in London,’ Payne murmured.

  ‘Isn’t the mayor any good? I understand he is in fact a Turk – or was it an amateur cyclist? Some of my sources are far from reliable, mind. He is both? How extraordinary. What do mayors do? I am sure we could do without mayors. What are mayors for?’

  ‘I really have no idea, darling.’

  ‘Places like London practically run themselves, don’t they? Which is as it should be, given the high prices of everything. In my humble opinion, Hughie, mayors are surplus to requirements.’

  ‘You may be right, darling. But you were telling me about the Remnants – about the strange etymology of their family name?’

  ‘It was originally de Ruminant – de Revenant, according to some sources, which doesn’t seem terribly likely but it is interesting, nevertheless, given that dead and buried male Remnants have a trick of coming back and causing mischief.’

  ‘Coming back as revenants?’

  ‘Yes. Dead male Remnants frequently fail to find peace and they tend to return in the shape of malignant ghosts. There’s a legend about it. That’s why they had Roderick cremated, I suspect, though of course they’d never admit it, to prevent him from walking out of his grave. They clearly didn’t want to be left with a tenantless grave,’ Lady Grylls concluded.

  ‘Something whispers to me that the late Lord Remnant wasn’t a terribly nice man.’

  ‘He wasn’t at all nice. The Grenadier of Grenadin made that abundantly clear. He was far from popular with those poor locals. He had an awful lot of people evicted, you see, and he had their houses demolished. His explanation to the camera was that he was averse to sharing. He said he couldn’t help his overdeveloped sense of privacy.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call that a particularly satisfactory explanation.’

  ‘Neither would I. Roderick boasted of building a golf course and an English bar. That cost him a pretty penny, he pointed out. But the locals failed to appreciate his efforts and they bombarded him with death threats, though he insisted he didn’t let that bother him one little bit. The camera showed him shrugging and yawning in an exaggeratedly unconcerned manner.’

  ‘Death threats, eh?’ Payne gave his aunt a sidelong glance. ‘What did Lord Remnant die of exactly?’

  ‘Heart attack or stroke or something. You don’t suppose one should suspect anything more sinister, do you? Tenantless Graves. That would make a good title for one of Antonia’s novels, you know.’

  ‘I don’t think Antonia�
�s ever written a novel to match a title.’

  ‘Would I be right in saying the appeal of Antonia’s books lies not in appeasing the reader’s appetite for sensation or emotion but in satisfying curiosity?’

  ‘You would be. Jolly well put, darling.’

  ‘What’s Antonia up to these days?’

  ‘Not much. Writing as usual. Or thinking about it. Or talking about it.’

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘No, not at all. It’s all great fun. She’s giving one of her rare interviews to some magazine this morning.’ Payne glanced at his watch. ‘In about an hour or so. Poor Antonia. She hates giving interviews.’

  ‘Poor Antonia. I am not sure I’d ever want to be a writer. I am being urged to write my memoirs, did I say? I was told I belonged to a vanishing breed and that whatever I wrote would sell like hot cakes … I rather doubt that … Do you think I could write about Corinne Coreille?* After all, the whole extraordinary episode took place at Chalfont.’

  ‘I don’t see why not. But you were telling me about the Remnants.’

  ‘The Remnants, yes. There’s a website devoted to the Remnant family, Provost tells me. Last night Provost got on the computer and ferreted out an awful lot of the most fascinating facts. No more fervent aficionado of the aristocracy than he exists among London’s millions.’ Lady Grylls shook her head. ‘Did you know you could get both Debrett’s and the Landed Gentry “online”? All at the click of a button!’

  ‘The internet has a lot to answer for,’ Payne said sternly.

  ‘There was something profoundly dubious about the early Remnants,’ Lady Grylls went on. ‘They thrived on patronage and blackmail and depended on largesse rather than industry for their richer hours. They worked exclusively at their pleasure and liked nothing better than striking attitudes. Remnants were single-minded and incredibly devious. They were liars and looters. They lacked self-awareness.’