The Murder Of Gonzago

‘Does Goda ever keep you waiting?’ Payne asked.

‘No, never. Why? She is most punctual. Oh. Is that a joke?’

‘Yes. A somewhat feeble one, I fear.’ The two ladies continued to look puzzled. ‘Waiting for Goda.’

The conversation then turned to the Damascus chest. Felicity explained that it had been the property of her late brother-in-law, but Clarissa had asked Felicity to take it off her hands. ‘Clarissa believed the chest was haunted. She warned me there was a noise coming from inside. She described it as a crump, crump, crump kind of noise. She kept hearing it, she said. A ghostly kind of munching.’

‘Did you hear it?’

‘Oh yes. Crump, crump, crump. Exactly as she’d described it. It was particularly bad at night. Gerard said he couldn’t bear it. It really got on our nerves, so I took the chest to a shop in Kensington Gore. I explained about the noise.’

‘I bet they thought you were prey to aural illusions,’ Lady Grylls said.

‘Well, they heard it too, so they agreed to investigate and to reline the drawers, as they seemed to have been gnawed by some sort of creature. A couple of days later they called me and showed me a jar containing what looked like a cross between a worm and a slug. The thing was large, white, obese and obscene beyond belief!’

‘How perfectly ghastly.’ Lady Grylls took a sip of coffee.

‘They found it inside the chest wall, they said. Heaven knows how long it had been there, but it had managed to eat all the surrounding wood of the drawers. To cut a long story short, the creature was handed over to the Natural History Museum where it now stands, pickled for posterity, while the chest was repaired and returned to me. It is perfectly all right now. No more monsters.’

‘It’s definitely got a presence about it,’ Lady Grylls said.

‘I’ve had the chest back for six months now and it’s as quiet as the grave,’ Felicity said.

‘It is magnificent. I would be delighted to have it,’ Payne said. ‘If you are still willing to sell it.’

‘Oh yes, I am. Clarissa insists the creature was in fact a reincarnated Remnant who came to haunt her. She is convinced it was one of Roderick’s late uncles, who was repulsively white and quite fat.’

‘My dear, what is that you’ve been watching?’ Lady Grylls gestured towards the frozen image on the TV screen. ‘It all looks terribly melodramatic. Is that man dead or dying? They strike me as familiar somehow – that woman with the wild hair – the dashing chap – where have I seen these actors before?’

‘They are not actors,’ Felicity Remnant said. ‘Look carefully, Nellie.’

Lady Grylls pushed her glasses up her nose. ‘I have an idea I saw them at the crematorium yesterday, but I am sure I am imagining it. I get more and more muddled these days.’

‘You did see them at the crematorium yesterday.’

‘What in heaven’s name do you mean, Felicity?’

Their hostess seemed to have come to a decision. ‘I received a package early this morning. It came in a Jiffy bag. As a matter of fact, it was addressed to Gerard. I had an odd feeling about it, so I opened it. It contained a videotape, which had no label – no writing of any kind – nothing to indicate what it was. An old battered videotape. I put it on – and I had the shock of my life.’

Major Payne finished his coffee. Realization had dawned on him. ‘You don’t mean that the man lying on the chaise longue is the late Lord Remnant?’

‘That’s my brother-in-law, yes. My brother-in-law’s death has been captured “on camera”, as I believe the expression is. I’d like you to see it.’ Felicity picked up the remote control. She looked at Major Payne. ‘I may need your advice.’

8

The Murder of Gonzago (1)

The image was black and white and not very clear. An intermittent jerking movement suggested the recording had been made with a hand-held camera. There was no sound.

A man was seen sitting at a dressing table, in front of a mirror. He was almost bald and his eyes had sinister dark circles round them. He gave a knowing wink at the camera and proceeded to put on a wig, a pair of caterpillar eyebrows, a beard, and, finally, a crown. Then, giving every impression of it being an afterthought, he put on a false nose. As he did so, he stuck out his tongue at the camera.

‘My brother-in-law is quite impossible. Was.’ Felicity paused the video.

‘In that documentary he said he could be himself only when he was somebody else,’ Lady Grylls said.

‘It seems Roderick didn’t want to do that documentary to start with, but then suddenly changed his mind,’ Felicity said. ‘Gerard couldn’t recognize him at first; he hadn’t seen him for so long, you see. Roderick seemed to have become more manic and he kept losing his temper.’

‘That’s what happens if one spends too much time in the sun,’ Lady Grylls said.

‘Apparently he used to pay regular visits to a local witch doctor,’ said Felicity. ‘He was in the habit of taking all sorts of highly dubious potions and powders and things, though they did seem to have had the desired rejuvenating effect. The rumour among the locals was that he’d actually sold his soul to the Devil.’

Lady Grylls gave a reminiscent laugh. ‘He sang “Chattanooga Choo Choo” in duet with his estate agent, but got excessively cross when the poor fellow deigned to walk ahead of him and he tried to punch him on the nose. How he screamed at him. He clearly considered it lese-majeste. You and he didn’t get on frightfully well, did you, my dear?’

‘Not frightfully well, no. My brother-in-law was an acquired taste and that’s putting it mildly. Well, since he chose to spend most of his time in Grenadin, we hardly ever laid eyes on him.’

‘When was the last time you saw him?’

‘About ten years ago. We were invited to Grenadin, but it wasn’t a particularly auspicious occasion. Poor Gerard suffered the most awful mosquito bites. My brother-in-law boasted of having become a crack shot. He was terribly eager to do a William Tell. He asked me to stand in the garden with an apple on my head. He claimed he could fell it with a single shot.’

‘Did you agree to it?’ Payne asked.

‘Of course not.’

‘That’s how Paul Bowles killed his wife… Similar sort of set-up.’

‘You haven’t seen the documentary, Hughie, have you? Oh, but you must,’ Lady Grylls said. ‘For some reason they kept referring to it as a meta-documentary.’

‘Did they?’

‘You look as though you know what that means. I believe Provost recorded it when it was on the box, so I’ll give you the video. Do remind me.’ Lady Grylls turned to their hostess. ‘Let’s see what happens next, my dear, shall we?’

As Felicity pressed Play, the scene changed to a room of a striking art deco design. They saw an arch hung with a shimmering, transparent curtain and double doors made of what Payne imagined was onyx and silver. The enormous torchieres with serpentine curves had been derived, as Payne was to learn later, from Poelzig’s expressionistic columns designed for the foyer of Max Reinhardt’s Grosses Schauspielhaus in 1919.

The room was spacious and accented with circular and semicircular lines and arches placed within arches. The windows were curved like goldfish bowls, there was a rounded fireplace and clustered flowerlike lighting fixtures hung from the ceiling. The camera focused on a chaise longue covered in what looked like camellia blossoms.

‘La Sorciere. Roderick’s house on his island,’ Felicity explained.

A couple of feet behind the chaise longue were french windows with net curtains over them. A middle-aged woman went up to the windows and drew the silk curtains across. She had silver hair, dramatically mascara’d eyes and star-shaped earrings; she was clad in a long dress. At one point she produced a pair of glasses and put them on her nose.

The camera swirled round and several other people came into view. A man and a woman wearing cardboard helmets raised their hands to their foreheads in a military salute. A young woman with long dark hair parted in the