The Murder Of Gonzago

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 cliched, 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 cliches.

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 Clarissa 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 Maria-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.’