The Murder Of Gonzago

‘No… How very curious,’ said Antonia.

‘And there’s something else. It’s been at the back of my mind all this time. It concerns Lord Remnant’s hands. In fact I should have started with Lord Remnant’s hands.’

Antonia urged her to continue.

‘It was moments after Dr Sylvester-Sale discovered that Lord Remnant had been shot through the back of the head. I happened to look at Lord Remnant’s hands-’ Louise broke off. ‘They shouldn’t have moved him. That’s a criminal offence! You don’t cart around people who have died a violent death, do you?’

‘No.’

‘There should have been a proper investigation, but Clarissa wouldn’t hear of it. She told me to shut up. She was appallingly rude to me. Clarissa managed to pass her husband’s murder off as a natural death. She got the two doctors to sign the death certificate!’

‘What exactly was wrong with Lord Remnant’s hands?’

‘Well, they were smooth, without a blemish, but they shouldn’t have been. The wound should have been there, but it wasn’t.’

‘What wound?’

‘The stabbing wound. Stephan stabbed him with a pen. In his right hand. Here-’ Louise tapped the back of her hand, the space between her thumb and forefinger. ‘It happened a couple of days earlier. Lord Remnant had it bandaged, but then he removed the bandage. He said it was nothing, though the red weal was there all right. A flaming kind of red.’

‘But it wasn’t there when you looked at his hands after he died?’

‘No. It had disappeared! There was no wound. Not the slightest mark. The red scar was there all right at dinner! I was sitting next to Lord Remnant, you see.’ Louise scowled. ‘I don’t know how the two things fit together, but I have an idea they do. I mean, the giggle and the wound that was not there – and in some mad way, it all ties up with the Grimaud.’

‘Who or what is the Grimaud?’ Antonia asked gravely.

Louise told her. ‘Do you see? It doesn’t exist, it’s nothing but a superstition, yet Stephan insisted on having seen it arrive in a coffin! The Grimaud is believed to presage somebody’s death, or rather to bring it about… Well, Lord Remnant did die that night,’ she added thoughtfully.

‘When did the coffin arrive at the house?’

‘Some time in the afternoon, Stephan said. The coffin was brought by a hearse and was placed inside the laundry. Stephan went and looked through the window. He swears he saw the Grimaud crawl out of the coffin. Now, as a witness, Stephan is far from reliable, but he described the Grimaud in such vivid detail, it sent shivers down my spine!’

‘What does the Grimaud look like?’ This, Antonia decided, promises to become our most exotic case.

‘Shiny papier-mache head, like a ventriloquist’s doll, nose so upturned as to resemble a pig’s snout, and it has three rows of teeth. Quite nightmarish. It was dressed in white tails and Stephan believes he caught a glimpse of a white topper sticking out of the coffin as well.’

‘Where were you at the time?’

‘All of us – with the exception of Stephan and Clarissa – were inside the house. Lord Remnant insisted on showing us some of their home movies. Recordings of various amateur theatricals. So tedious. Everybody dressed up as dentists or minor emigre royalty or organic vegetables or Christmas tree decorations- Was that funny, Mrs Rushton?’

‘No. Well, yes. Sorry.’

‘The Remnants led a life of indolent futility – of effortless nullity – and seemed to expect to be admired for it!’

‘Who do you think shot Lord Remnant? Do you have any ideas?’

‘I am absolutely sure Clarissa is in some way involved. Perhaps it was one of her lovers, at her instigation? Clarissa was reputed to be running the most spectacular galaxy of lovers. That black doctor, for example, who later came and signed the death certificate?’

‘You believe they were lovers?’

‘Of course they were lovers. Oh, how she looked at him, how she smiled at him! A smile that would have melted Iceland. The slow rotten smile of a slut. She is that sort of woman, Mrs Rushton. You should have heard the sounds she made when there were men around! Soft and syrupy-’

‘Am I right in thinking the gun came from Lord Remnant’s study?’

‘Yes. He kept it in the top drawer of his desk. The drawer was never locked. Everybody knew it was there… I saw him sitting at his desk, holding the gun, but that was in the morning, at about half past eleven. Hortense and I happened to be passing by the study – the door was open-’

Antonia frowned. ‘You saw-?’

‘He was smiling – he looked terribly pleased with himself. He was putting the silencer on the gun. At least I think it was a silencer. Hortense thought he was cleaning the gun, but I am sure she was wrong.’

Antonia couldn’t believe her ears. She pushed the plate with the pirog to one side. ‘Sorry – who was it you saw putting a silencer on the gun?’

‘Oh, didn’t I say? It was Lord Remnant.’

24

The Lost Symbol

The novel I propose to write falls into a genre often described by the cognoscenti as ‘experimental’ and by more conventional readers as ‘puzzling’, Gerard Fenwick, thirteenth Earl Remnant, wrote in his diary. Its status as a novel will owe absolutely nothing to the traditional definition of the form. There will be no hero or heroine, but there will certainly be an anti-hero and an anti-heroine.

At first sight my novel will seem more like a random collection of episodes, though the perceptive reader will soon become aware of interconnections at both a material and a thematic level: characters met in one story will pop up in another; a version of an event we heard of from one angle is later renarrated from another.

A tiny silver guillotine will make an intermittent symbolic appearance, a persistent reminder of the aristocracy’s ultimate fate, until it eventually vanishes into thin air, only to reappear most amazingly in the hands of someone well versed in the gentle art of blackmail.

It will be a murder mystery of sorts.

The novel will start with the obituary in The Times of an utterly impossible peer of the realm, the most peerless of asses, say, an earl. The obituary will give ‘heart attack’ as the cause of death, but in point of fact the unsavoury nobleman would have died as a result of a gun wound in the occiput.

It has just occurred to me that modern-day murder holds as exact a state as a medieval monarch. The exits and entrances are all laid down according to the most formal of protocols. Investigating officer, surgeon, photographer, fingerprint experts, DNA experts and so on make their bow and play their appointed part. (Do readers like police procedurals? Terribly boring, surely?)

It’s the dead man’s brother who tells the story and one of the central themes of the book will be the difficulty, nay the impossibility, of telling of an honest story. The narrator, as the dear reader will discover soon enough, turns out to be dramatically unreliable.

It is the narrator who will be exposed as the killer at the end. Or has that been done before? The narrator is of a largely lunatic cast of mind, something of which he is only partially aware, but he contrives to write in a frighteningly lucid, pedantic sort of way, which imparts to his story the black comic feel of Nabokov’s Pale Fire-

Gerard looked up. There had been a knock on the door.