Murder of Gonzago

‘No, it is not.’ Tears were rolling down her face. ‘It is not.’

‘Oh? Why not?’ The old fool wouldn’t dare pull the trigger, would she? On the other hand, she might. He reminded himself that she’d done it once already. If only he could get a little bit closer, he would have no problem disarming her. He could cosh her with the bottle, he supposed. Or blind her by splashing malt in her eyes. Stupid old fool.

‘How about a drinkie? Do you good. Give you a cosy feeling. No? I need to replenish my glass-’ He reached out for the bottle of malt.

‘Don’t move.’

‘No? It’s time for you to throw in the towel, don’t you think?’

‘Don’t move.’ She raised the gun. Heavens, she was aiming at his forehead!

He sighed again. ‘If you only knew how ridiculous you look. A woman at your time of life should be in her garden, snipping off the heads of defunct roses, or sitting in her boudoir, making intricately shaped tea-cosies.’

Actually she presented a damned unnerving sight with her complexion the colour of weak lemonade and those round glasses gleaming in the morning light.

‘The baby was born on the third of March 1965. It was a girl.’

‘Does the exact date matter?’

‘It does. The third of March 1965.’

‘Actually, that rings a bell,’ he said after a pause. ‘Now why is that?’

‘I gave her the name Clarissa.’

‘Oh yes. That’s Clarissa’s birthday. Of course. Third of March 1965. Actually, I met Clarissa at the Bruce- Daltons’. How things come back to one. That was three and a half years ago. Clarissa is the daughter of the Vuillaumys.’

‘No, she isn’t. They didn’t have any children. They adopted Clarissa.’

He stared at her. There was a pause. He put down his glass. ‘What are you trying to say, you old witch? What are you insinuating?’

‘Clarissa is our daughter. You married your own daughter.’

It took him a moment to recover his poise. ‘So what if I did? That kind of thing does happen. More often than one imagines, I am sure. The way you go on, one might be excused for thinking I’d strangled a whole litter of newborn babies or — or gone to a funeral, propped up the corpse in its coffin and performed a ventriloquist act. What was it the wag said? Vice is nice but incest is best-’ He broke off, amazed at his audacity. ‘Too late to make amends, anyhow.’

‘It is too late, yes,’ she said.

‘I suggest you keep your mouth zipped up, Miss Baedeker. Better, put a muzzle on it. You don’t want the world to know I married my daughter, do you? There’s the family name to consider and so on. I don’t want to give my sister-in-law the chance to indulge in schadenfreude. Still, Clarissa is my wife and, as it happens, I have started finding her madly attractive. In fact, I am going to her now-’

‘No, you are not.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘You are not.’

‘Keep out of my way, you old loon-’

‘Stay where you are.’

Suddenly Lord Remnant was possessed by a fury so intense that for a few seconds it paralysed speech and even thought. It swept through his body like a wave of physical nausea, leaving him white and shaking. No one ever opposed him! No one ever told him where to stay! He flared up.

‘How dare you hold me up? Who do you think you are? Give me the gun at once or I’ll break your bloody neck-’

As he took a step towards her, she pulled the trigger.

The bullet hit him between the eyes.

For a moment he stood extremely still, a surprised expression on his face, then he fell to the floor.

The next moment the door burst open and Antonia and Major Payne entered the room.

‘This time I got the right one,’ Hortense Tilling said.

35

The Clue of the Coiled Cobra

The walls and ceiling of the library at Remnant were painted with classical figures in colours that had succumbed to the draining power of the sun and were now faded to pastel. The Louis XIII chairs were upholstered in mauve velvet, which, Gerard Fenwick had pointed out with a slight grimace, was one of Clarissa’s legacies. The faience lions either side of the Gothic fireplace had once belonged to Catherine the Great. A lot of the books bore the coat of arms of Henry VIII or Elizabeth I. There were books printed on papier velin pur fil Lafuma.

‘She recognized him at dinner that night as he started recounting his unsavoury escapades from the mid- sixties,’ Major Payne was explaining. ‘He boasted of deflowering debutantes and of stealing their jewellery and keeping trophies. He then said that all the jewels his wife was wearing at that very moment had belonged to his victims.’

‘And then Hortense got her second and much greater shock, which probably unhinged her and led her to do what she did,’ said Antonia. ‘Lord Remnant had pointed to the bracelet Clarissa was wearing. Hortense recognized it instantly. It had belonged to her once. It was fashioned like a coiled cobra and was known as the Keppel Clasp.’

It was three weeks later and they were sitting in the library at Remnant Castle.

Gerard Fenwick, thirteenth Earl Remnant, looked up from the notes he had been making. ‘She put two and two together? The truth came to her in a flash? This is awfully good. Awfully good.’ He wore country tweeds, twills, fawn suede shoes and a red-and-white neck-square tied at a jaunty angle. He looked relaxed and happy. One wouldn’t have thought that that very morning his solicitors had warned him the divorce he was contemplating might turn out to be protracted, expensive and, very possibly, acrimonious.

Payne drew a forefinger across his jaw. ‘There was only one Keppel Clasp. Hortense told us it was quite unique. She also admitted it had been stolen from her. So we knew that there couldn’t be any mistake.’

‘You had your Eureka moment.’ Gerard nodded. ‘That sudden, exultant sense of revelation, when the detective sees with absolute certainty the answer to the puzzle. I’ve been wondering about it. The image is quite striking, you know.’

‘What image?’

‘The multicoloured pieces of a spherical puzzle whirling wildly, round and round, and then, piece by piece, clicking together into a perfect globe … Is that how it happens?’

‘More or less,’ Antonia said. It wasn’t quite like that, but why disappoint him?

‘How terribly exciting. I do disapprove of murder, mind, but this is terribly exciting. How did you work things out exactly?’

‘Well, we saw a photograph of Hortense wearing the bracelet. Hugh then remembered spotting that same bracelet on Clarissa’s wrist in the Gonzago video. And then Louise Hunter told me what Lord Remnant had said at dinner — and she confirmed that Clarissa had been wearing the Keppel Clasp. She also said Hortense had looked extremely shocked — sick as a parrot.’

‘There was a book I read as a boy. Cannot remember what it was about, but it had a bloody marvellous title. The Clue of the Coiled Cobra.’ Gerard Fenwick glanced at the high Gothic bookshelves surmounted by niches containing the busts of Homer, Horace and other ancient men of letters. ‘By someone called Bruce Campbell … There it is — I think that’s the one — between Bonjour Tristesse and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. It shouldn’t be there at all.’

‘You haven’t been trying to arrange the books thematically, have you?’ Payne asked.