Murder of Gonzago (15 page)

Renée broke down and dissolved into sobs. Gerard Fenwick put a slightly awkward avuncular arm around her shoulders.

‘There, there. What is the matter? I knew there was something wrong.’

‘Everything’s wrong – everything!’

‘That’s not possible, my dear. Not
everything
. I don’t believe the end of the world has come yet, has it?’

‘No. No. I am sorry,’ Renée said indistinctly, her face pressed against the lapel of his tweed jacket. ‘I am so sorry.’

‘Nothing to be sorry about,’ he reassured her.

‘I want to die. You can kill me if you like.’

‘What a damned silly thing to say. Why should I want to kill you? I don’t need to
silence
you. You don’t really think I killed my brother, do you?’

‘No. I know you didn’t. It’s just come to me. You couldn’t have got hold of the gun. The gun was taken from Lord Remnant’s study.’ She pulled away slightly and sniffed. ‘Unless someone handed it over to you.’

‘Yes, I might have had an accomplice.’ Gerard smiled. ‘Only I didn’t.’

‘You were there that night – why were you there?’

He gave her his handkerchief and said gallantly, ‘Won’t you first tell me what’s upset you so much? No, wait.’ He
crossed to his desk and produced a bottle of brandy and a tumbler. ‘You
must
have some of this. It’ll put some colour in your cheeks.’

She blew her nose, dabbed at her eyes and sat down. She held the glass of brandy, took a dutiful sip. She then blurted out the whole pathetic tale. She knew it was a doomed entanglement, she said; she had known it from the very start, yet she had allowed herself to become obsessed with Dr Sylvester-Sale.

They had had a secret affair at La Sorcière. Syl had told her he loved her. He had said that she was his only really solid and unseverable lien with the world—

‘That’s rather good, actually, do let me make a note of it.’ Gerard reached for his notebook. ‘
Unseverable lien with the world
. Do chaps talk like that? Outside books, that is?’

‘I’ve never heard anyone else say it,’ she admitted.

‘No, of course not. He said it to impress you. He never meant any of it. That should have put you on your guard, my dear. “Syl”, did you say? How very interesting. It’s an anagram of “sly”. “Rain” now is an anagram of “Iran”, though I don’t think that’s in any way important.
An anachronistic anagram annoyed by anonymity
…’

Dr Sylvester-Sale had made promises, Renée said, which she had believed, even though she had been perfectly aware of his affair with Clarissa. Her waking moments had been filled with thoughts of him. He was terribly good-looking, she hadn’t been able to help herself.

They had planned their future together, but, after they had been back in England a couple of days, his phone calls had suddenly stopped. She had started stalking him, she was ashamed to admit. She had seen him in the company of a red-haired woman. She had seen them kiss. She had been distraught. She had thought of throwing herself under a passing car. She might have been a lovelorn schoolgirl.

Gerard leant back and, picking up his smouldering cigar, said, ‘I must admit I am extremely surprised, Renée. I thought you were the epitome of cool and self-possession.’

‘Well, I’m not.’

‘Shall we have a game of demon patience, the way we used to? It might help you see things in perspective. I have a pack of cards somewhere.’ He glanced vaguely round.

‘No, thank you, Gerard. Not now. I’ll be fine.’ She blew her nose.

‘Would you allow me to take you out to dinner somewhere later on?’ I’d very much like to marry her, he thought. ‘At about seven?’

‘I am not sure.’

‘Of course you are. I don’t think you have a prior engagement, have you?’

‘I am not sure. I haven’t.’

‘There you are! How about the Caprice?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I am going to book a table. If you fancy eggs Benedict and steak tartare, that’s the place to go.’

Over dinner, he told her
his
story. It was as pathetic as hers. He too had made a fool of himself. He had acted irrationally, out of character, without much thought as to what
exactly
he intended to do. He had been in Scotland, in the Highlands, fishing in the river Spey when he had received a call from Roderick. None of this would have happened if he hadn’t had his mobile phone in his pocket. Weren’t mobiles the scourge of the modern age? After his late brother had challenged him, Gerard had got exceedingly angry, he’d seen red, he’d felt like killing Roderick – quite unlike himself, really. He had changed, packed a small case and driven to the nearest airport, hopped on a plane and flown to Grenadin.

‘I only had an overnight bag with me. I got a cab from the airport, but when we reached the estate, I decided to walk. I wanted to clear my head. There was a moon. Lovely weather – apart from the blasted mosquitoes.’

‘So that
was
a mosquito bite!’

‘Yes. That was most perspicacious of you, my dear. Well, I got to La Sorcière and went in through the gate at the back. I walked up the avenue. I no longer felt cross, only a little stupid. Still, I intended to discuss finance with Roderick. I thought it might make a difference if I confronted him, if I put him “on the spot”, as the phrase goes.’

‘You needed money …’

‘Well, yes. He had so much money, it was ridiculous, keeping it all to himself. I needed money for my Dilettanti Droug idea. Well, I came up to the terrace – heard voices coming from behind the french windows – heard a splashing sound coming from the garden—’

‘Stephan. That was Stephan. He was beside the pool.’

‘Then I saw a movement – there was someone by the french windows. Couldn’t tell if it was man or woman. Figure dressed in some light-coloured clothing. Put me in mind of the woman in white, though it might have been a man. My brother always wore white, didn’t he? Sorry, that’s neither here nor there. I saw the figure move away from the window and disappear down the side steps of the terrace.’

‘Which way did the figure go?’

‘Haven’t the foggiest. I didn’t think anything of it, though I instinctively knew there had been something excessively furtive about the way it had moved—’

‘Furtive?’

‘Yes … I threw away my cigar. I hadn’t finished it, but I didn’t want to attract attention, you know. I walked up the steps – and on to the terrace. I saw the french windows were ajar, but of course the curtains were drawn over them on the inside, so I couldn’t see anything. I heard voices. A man said something – someone gasped –
did he really mean Lord Remnant had been murdered?
Something on those lines. I am sure it was a woman who said that.’

‘Louise Hunter.’

‘For a moment I thought it was all part of some silly charade or parlour game. The Murder Game, you know, or that you were putting on some kind of a play. Roderick was potty about theatricals, wasn’t he?’

‘He was. Liked nothing better.’

‘I didn’t really know what to make of it. Then I remembered the figure I’d seen earlier on and suddenly felt goosebumps down my spine. I stumbled over some bulky object – a monstrous head goggled up at me!’

‘Bottom’s head.’

‘Made me jump out of my skin. That’s when I must have dropped my cigar cutter, don’t you think?’ Gerard pulled at his lip. ‘The next moment I saw the gun. It lay beside the head. Well, I knew then there was something very rotten indeed in the state of Denmark. I realized I’d made a mistake coming. It had been madness. If Roderick had really been killed, I’d be a prime suspect. After all I had a goodish motive for wanting my brother out of the way.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Well, I swung round and ran down the terrace steps and back on the avenue. I got out and hailed a cab, which took me back to the airport. I hopped on the next plane back to Scotland.’

There was a pause.

‘You found yourself standing on the terrace
after
the murder was committed. I wonder if the figure you saw was the killer,’ Renée Glover said. ‘It couldn’t have been Stephan. Stephan was sitting beside the pool – you heard him – he was dropping pebbles. That’s where we found him later on … So you can’t say if it was a man or a woman you saw outside the windows?’

‘I am afraid not, my dear. It happened very fast. One moment the figure in white was there, the next moment it was gone. Was anyone out of the room at the time of the shooting?’

‘Well, yes,’ Renée answered promptly. ‘Hortense. She said she was going to the loo.’

‘It might have been her then. She might have run out and shot Roderick … Was she dressed in white that evening?’

‘I believe she was.’ Renée smiled. ‘I don’t think Hortense shot your brother. She is muddle-headed and scatty and not particularly practical. It took her
ages
to understand how a camera works. Besides, her eyesight’s really bad. She couldn’t even see the stripes on a zebra.’

‘She may have been putting it on.’

‘I don’t think she was. She disliked Lord Remnant, but I very much doubt it was she who killed him.’

‘Well, if Stephan didn’t shoot Roderick and if Hortense didn’t and if I didn’t – who did?’

There was a pause.

‘It was
such
a strange evening,’ said Renée. ‘Just before dinner I happened to go into the laundry room and what do you think I saw there? You’d never guess.
A brand new coffin painted white
.’

‘A coffin in the laundry room? Odd place to leave a coffin. Couldn’t it have been a prop of some kind? For a play my brother may have been contemplating?’

‘When I mentioned the coffin to Clarissa, she said she had no idea where it had come from. She looked annoyed. With me – but I also had an idea she was annoyed with herself.’

‘How terribly interesting. Annoyed with herself – for not being more careful? Suggests she was involved – um – in whatever was going on? Perhaps something was brought to La Sorcière in that coffin? Or
someone
? A coffin suggests transportation … Would you like a cigar, my dear?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘No, it wouldn’t be quite your style. You do look awfully pretty in that dress, Renée. So terribly fresh and innocent. Perhaps we could take a holiday together some time, you and I? What do you think? Felicity smokes my cigars, did
I tell you? I wonder if that’s good enough grounds for divorce?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘She says it isn’t her. But it
must
be her. She keeps pinching my cigars and then denies it. Hate petty deceptions like that.’

‘Something else happened later that night,’ Renée said. ‘Clarissa announced she wanted to spend some time alone with her husband’s body. She told everybody to go to bed. As I didn’t feel at all tired, I sneaked out and took a turn in the garden. When I eventually went up, I happened to pass Lord Remnant’s dressing-room door. She was inside. I heard her voice. She was talking in an urgent whisper.’

‘She may have been praying. Isn’t that possible? For Roderick’s soul and so on? Asking God to spare Roderick and not despatch him to hell? She may be a Catholic, you know. There was a time when no Remnant would touch a Catholic with a bargepole, but things have changed. We know nothing about Clarissa. Nothing at all.’

‘It didn’t sound like a prayer.’ Renée shook her head. ‘It sounded as though – as though she was arguing with someone.’

‘She couldn’t have been arguing with my brother because he was dead. Well, people living in the Balkans and suchlike countries tend to talk to their dead as they lie in the coffin. Part of a long-standing tradition, I imagine. I think it’s called “lamentations”, but lamenting is hardly what one would expect of Clarissa, is it?’

‘Hardly.’

‘Clarissa loathed my brother – or so Felicity says. Felicity insists Clarissa had lots of lovers … Did you say you thought Clarissa was arguing with someone? You didn’t hear anyone answer her, did you?’

‘No. I didn’t dare go too near the door. I didn’t stop for long. I was terribly nervous.’

‘She may have been talking to herself. In my opinion Clarissa’s gone mad. Getting rid of all the servants, staying at Remnant all by herself and so on.’

‘I can’t help feeling that there is some unknown factor at work …’

‘Perhaps my brother’s death is destined to go down the centuries as one of those unsolved mysteries – unless Payne and his detective-story-writing wife manage to crack it somehow, though that seems most unlikely. It is only in books that the zeal of amateurs is rewarded by success. I do believe, my dear, my next novel will be a whodunnit.’

‘I thought you hated whodunnits.’

‘Not any longer. I have every intention of experimenting with the form. Genre conventions could be subverted while still being decorously observed.’ Gerard spoke dreamily. ‘A mysterious death in an exotic locale. A murder committed during an amateur theatrical production. A small circle of suspects—’

‘You intend to write an autobiographical whodunnit?’

‘I don’t see why novels shouldn’t be rooted in experience. Not such a bad idea if a character’s emotional concerns are in fact the author’s emotional concerns, even if I do take exception to the concept of uninhibited autobiography. What I am drawn to is the novelist’s freedom to blend, to compress, to conflate, to reframe. There’s a phrase that sums it up awfully well. What was it? Transformative power. Being able to take things that were terribly puzzling and make them lucid, producing an entertainment out of what was horrifying and disturbing. Now
that
would be a whacking big achievement. Wouldn’t you say?’

‘I would.’ She smiled. ‘I see what you mean.’

‘
Who eliminated the earl?
That will be the question in everybody’s mind. Is it the drug-crazed stepson? The dotty aunt? The flighty chatelaine? The dashing doctor? The cigar-smoking
sister-in-law? The actual solution will of course be something completely unexpected … I rather like the idea of there being an unknown factor at work. Readers expect radical reversals, don’t they?’

No blinding light on the road to Damascus! No, of course not. Cold and sharp as flint. It cut his face as soon as he walked out of the Ritz. His hand went up to check he was not bleeding.

He put on his gloves. ‘
Je reviens
,’ he murmured.

He’d forgotten how perfectly foul the English weather could be.

He already missed the ambience of hedonistic freedom he had left behind, the glinting harmonies of sea, sky and golden sands. He missed his white pyjamas. And what a bore it was, having to wait for his ‘inheritance’! He was not used to waiting, to not being able to spend as lavishly as he at some point might feel like.

There was shockingly little money in the account of the man renowned for his one hundred faces and one hundred and one voices, as he had discovered. (Had Quin been a gambler?) His own cards he could no longer use since they had all been cancelled the day after he had ‘died’. Damned frustrating. What was it they said? Reasonable thrift is a virtue when practised by the rich, a dire necessity when practised by the poor. As it happened, he wasn’t used to thrift of any kind, so there.

Neither by training nor by temperament was he fitted
to the rigours of everyday life. Never before had he found himself lashed to the masts of actuality. A good many things, mundane, rather banal things, which mere mortals did all the time, he had never done. He had been shielded by his immense wealth and position. He had never been on a double-decker bus, for example, never travelled by tube, never got up early in the morning because he had to, never had to wait to see a doctor or a dentist, never stood in a queue.

At one time, before he’d decided it constituted a gross intrusion into his privacy, he had never dressed in the mornings without the help of a personal valet.

But there was no question of him practising thrift. He was going to claim his legacy very soon now. Then he could do as he pleased. He would be able to satisfy his every whim.

He wouldn’t stay in England, oh no. He hated England. So terribly dull and cold and shoddy and so full of foreigners. He would travel. He wouldn’t stop in a place for more than five days because he would get bored.

Perhaps he would sell his soul to the Devil and achieve immortality. He’d been thinking about it. He had the spell written out on a slip of paper in his breast pocket; the voodoo doctor had assured him that it worked.

He was clad in an immense black cloak with a burgundy silk lining, which imparted to him the air of a stage magician, which in a way he was. (Now you see me, now you don’t.) On his head he wore a homburg, on his eyes tinted glasses. His sideburns were reddish brown. Of course they were not
his
sideburns. Not strictly speaking. Thinking about his false whiskers cheered him up and he swung his silver-topped cane. He hummed an old-fashioned tune.
I am the pride of Piccadilly, the blasé roué
.

He rather enjoyed wearing disguise, always had. He found it liberating. Each time he wore disguise he felt like a butterfly that had broken from its chrysalis and taken
wing. His disguise at the moment was of the minimal kind. He liked taking risks. He delighted in pushing his luck. It occurred to him that he possessed the full Byronic equipment of noble lineage, unorthodox imagination, a restless spirit and a daring soul.

He found staying at the Ritz irksome; he couldn’t quite put his finger on the reason for it. He didn’t relish walking up and down Piccadilly either. He thought he did, but he didn’t. Too many people of little or no distinction, rather common-looking, in fact; a great stumbling mass; a herd of accursed
canaille
following their hackneyed inclinations.

He had never been in a crowd before. Nothing as intolerable as a crowd had ever been imposed on his person. He hated to be touched. He’d rather swim Lake Maracaibo than allow himself to be touched. Why did they keep touching him? He felt like raising his stick and hitting out left and right, then right and left.
Swish-swish
. It would be like topping nettles.

He looked foreign, he supposed, with his bleached eyebrows and polished mahogany complexion, but then most of the people who bumped into him also looked foreign, which wasn’t something he approved of. Not in England, at any rate. It was all too disorienting for words. It gave him a headache.

England was going to the dogs, no doubt about it.

There was nothing like a walk round St James’s, he found, to get his bile flowing. He had always been aware of a strong anti-Establishment streak in him.

He detested the ‘distinguished’ hatters, gunsmiths and boot-makers, the ‘exclusive’ shops selling unbelievably small, exorbitantly priced fiddly bits connected with
fly-fishing,
the whole area designed predominantly for a certain type of elderly pinstriped pillar of the Establishment. But most of all he hated the gentlemen’s clubs, those middens of priggishness and betrayal.

It was only with great difficulty that he resisted the temptation to pay his old club a visit and wreak some kind of havoc inside. He would have enjoyed smashing a gilded mirror or two with his stick, knocking off old Rees-Mogg’s glasses or punching a hole in that portrait of Baden-Powell. Oh, how his hands itched!

The management had blackballed him a couple of years back, the moralizing morons. He couldn’t remember the reason for his expulsion. Well, he didn’t think much of them either. Smug, small-minded nincompoops, mostly rather inept, quite absurd, leading puzzled, barren lives – like children standing at a grave, searching futilely for the secret of life. He had no patience with them. Not worth his wrath, really.

The moment you learnt to speak, you dedicated your new faculty to unsettling or outraging people
. That was what a tedious old uncle of his, long dead, had once told him. His French governess had babbled about his
mauvaises habitudes
. He had been the proverbial demon child. He remembered Deirdre, his late wife, telling him that he was evil in a rather
old-fashioned
kind of way, whatever that might mean.

No, he mustn’t do anything that would attract attention. They would most certainly try to arrest him if he did, which would be a bore. He mustn’t let the police take a close look at him. Or, rather, at Peter Quin. Which of course was the same thing. He kept forgetting.

There is no difference between continued affectation and reality
. It was Congreve or someone who wrote that.

Yes. Quite.

He sat on a bench in Green Park, yawned prodigiously and stared before him for what seemed an age. He pushed his underlip out petulantly, always an ominous sign to those who knew him. His scowl deepened. He was bored. A dark despondency had him in its grip and he could see no future for the human race. He’d been hurl’d from th’ethereal sky,
down to this bottomless perdition, here to dwell. Not in adamantine chains and penal fire, true, though that afforded him little consolation.

He hated being at a loose end. He felt like a shark out of water. He had an acute sense of anticlimax. He didn’t think anonymity suited his temperament. Despatching couriers with horns to clear the roads for his passage would have been more his style.

Gripping his silver-topped stick between his gloved hands, he thrashed at a pigeon. His mood then suddenly improved. He rose. Moments later he was back in Piccadilly, standing in front of a shop window, admiring his reflection. He reminded himself that he belonged to that stratospheric breed of men to whom the world was but a lump of clay, infinitely pliable to their wants and whims.

‘What I want,’ he mouthed at his reflection, ‘is a pair of wings.
Black
wings. They’ve
got
to be black.’

He found exactly the kind of wings he wanted half an hour later at a little shop in Covent Garden, which specialized in different kinds of theatrical paraphernalia. Black wings, something funereal about them, rather sinister, exactly as he had envisaged them.

‘Are these real feathers? I like the feel of feathers nearly as much as I like the feel of fur. I am going to wear ’em, you know,’ he said as he watched the young man place the wings inside a rectangular tulip-red box. ‘
Soon
.’

The shop assistant, accustomed to eccentric customers, gave a polite smile.

Looking round at the grinning masks on the shelves, he thought of the Grimaud. He hadn’t seen the arrival of the magnificent white hearse drawn by plumed horses, but the knowledge that it had been there was enough for him. He liked putting on a show even when he was not around to see it.

Purchasing the wings put him in a state of reckless
excitement. He attempted to trip up a barbaric blob of a woman with his stick and stuck out his tongue at a little boy, then had a Cuba Libre with gin at the Criterion, which further raised his spirits, though he intensely disliked the girl who served him.

The silly creature was plump and she seemed to find the sight of him comical, for some reason. The flaming cheek of it! She had clapped her hand over her mouth.

He eyed her with a glare of indescribable malignancy, which only seemed to provide her with further amusement. His face turned the colour of raspberry jam. The impudent hussy clearly had no idea who he was; she couldn’t possibly know that his pedigree had been established in a direct line by genealogists from the year 65 of the Christian era and that he had been brought up in a house where most objects had at one time or other been owned or handled by a king or an emperor! He nearly complained to the management about her but decided against it. Fuss was so middle-class.

He would stay at Remnant a while. Not for too long, goodness, no. He would be bored. But he would stay long enough.

His thoughts turned to Clarissa. Clarissa was not plump. Far from it. Clarissa was imperially slender, with the delicious, delicate curves of a succubus fashioned in dreams …

I am a traveller in an arid desert, he thought, but there is an oasis in sight.

He would drive. He would rent a car. Apart from Clarissa, there would be no one else at Remnant. No servants. Not even Tradewell, who had always gazed at him with a rather pathetic expression of awed devotion on his face. He had instructed Clarissa to keep the place empty and she had done so.

He had felt an unaccustomed leaning towards caution. Was he getting old? He hated the idea of encroaching old
age. The funny thing was that he didn’t feel he was sliding into his dotage. He felt energized, rejuvenated. He had started experiencing the kind of desires that had troubled him as young man …

The powder. The powder seemed to be working. Freshly aborted human foetuses. That was what the voodoo doctor had told him. Strange-looking fellow, jet-black, with peculiar orange-yellow eyes, like a cat’s, veined with purple, but he clearly knew what he was talking about.

He now felt drawn towards Remnant Castle as if by some magnetic force. He would start early tomorrow morning, some time after four.

The hour between the first lightening of the morning sky and sunrise was his most auspicious time, the voodoo fellow had told him. It was then that his energies were at their most vibrant and his aura most vividly coloured, apparently.

He rather liked the idea of arriving at a house submerged in murk, or as morning came to consciousness and light crept up between the shutters …

He would sneak in through a side door and go up the stairs, past the portraits of his savage, wily, fearless ancestors. He had no doubt his ancestors would have approved not only of what he had done, but also of what he was planning to do.

He was a true Remnant. His brother, on the other hand, was not. The fact that Gerard had turned up at La Sorcière on the night of the murder suggested little more than misguided bravado. A damned ineffectual chap, Gerard, like all bookish chaps. As a boy his brother had been potty about the Arthurian legend and perhaps he had seen himself as that flower of chivalry, Sir Lancelot, on a white warhorse, charging the Monster of Remnant, lance at the ready!

There had been a full moon that night and he had seen Gerard from his dressing-room window. Had Gerard travelled all the way to Grenadin intent on committing fratricide? Who could tell? If he had, he’d been too late!

Once more he looked into the near future and saw himself arriving at Remnant Castle, striding stealthily down the corridor towards Clarissa’s bedroom. Clarissa would be in her bed. She would still be sleeping. He would open her bedroom door – he’d be able to hear her breathing, perhaps he’d see the rising and falling of her bosom …

He experienced another surge of youthful energy.

The once-familiar flame. He might have swallowed a dose of ethyl chloride … Why, he hadn’t felt like that for
years
.