Murder of Gonzago

‘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,’ Renee 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,’ Renee 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.’ Renee 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 Renee. ‘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 Sorciere 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, Renee. 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,’ Renee 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.’ Renee 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?’

29 Bent Sinister

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