The Riddle of Sphinx Island

by R. T. Raichev

  ‘He is mad,’ Ella whispered.

  ‘Not clinically insane, only transcendentally wicked. That, in case you wonder, was said about Adolph Hitler. I admit Oswald is an interesting case. But does he really want you to stay with him? I find this very curious. He has made it abundantly clear that he has a schwarm for Maisie.’

  ‘His schwarm for Maisie is simply a new element in the game he has been playing with me,’ Ella said. ‘Oswald wants me to stay and watch him being adored. It’s all so pathetic, but that’s the kind of person he is. He warned me not to discuss him with Maisie. If you so much as open your mouth, Ella, if I hear that you’ve been trying to win her over to your side, you and your brother are finished.’

  ‘Ach. He relishes playing the bogeyman. Fear can be a powerful weapon in the hands of someone like Oswald. Because he is so rich and powerful, you have convinced yourself he can do anything he says … I think you should call his bluff.’

  She shook her head violently. She couldn’t do it. She was not brave enough. ‘That’s why I am still with him –’ She broke off. ‘You don’t think Feversham is spying on us, do you? I keep seeing him creeping about each time we are together.’

  ‘Does Feversham creep about? I haven’t noticed.’

  ‘I don’t know. I may have imagined it. I’ve been sleeping badly … I really don’t know what to do … Perhaps I am doomed to spend the rest of my life with Oswald. What else could I possibly do? Kill myself? Kill Oswald? Fake my own death and disappear under a new identity? Pay someone to kill Oswald? Sometimes I get the craziest ideas. Do forgive me! I really don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Sometimes the craziest ideas are the best,’ Doctor Klein said gravely. ‘But materially Oswald is good to you, yes? You said he was a generous employer?’

  ‘Oh he is extremely generous. I can’t fault Oswald on that count. He pays me a very good salary. He makes sure I have everything I want. I have an unlimited access to cash. He gives me expensive presents. He never forgets my birthday. I am the proverbial bird in a gilded cage. Is my cheek still red?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Oswald seems to like the idea of a triangle … Before it was Martita, me and him. Now it is Maisie, me and him … I am sorry for that girl. She is the perfect innocent, isn’t she? What a night … full moon.’ Ella’s eyes remained fixed on the open window. There was a pause. ‘To think – to think that Oswald was nearly killed! That bullet might so easily have got him in the head. Have you thought of that?’

  ‘The thought did occur to me, yes,’ Doctor Klein said.

  12

  AU COEUR DE LA NUIT

  John de Coverley lay in bed. He kept slipping in and out of sleep but he wasn’t dreaming, not exactly, rather his mind was behaving in a manner not dissimilar to that of an ancient television set in an advanced stage of an electronic disease. He saw images that flickered and dissolved in monochrome chaos, then formed again indecisively as if behind some undulating flood.

  One image slowly came into focus. Why, it was a seagull – a giant seagull! He would have loved to be able to shoot it but he had no gun – the gun had been taken away from him – but he saw he wore his thick leather gloves. If only he could catch up with it, he’d wring its neck. The creature kept flapping its wings and emitting worried squawking noises. Really it was most provoking. It was a new breed of seagull, John could see. The head looked quite human – a woman’s head – the same eyes as –

  He woke up with a start. So he’d been dreaming after all.

  What they did to me was outrageous, John thought. Unpardonable. They – his impossible sister’s houseguests – had put him under house arrest.

  It was his impossible sister who was to blame for the whole thing.

  What he felt like doing was wringing Sybil’s neck.

  Sybil de Coverley couldn’t sleep either.

  How did one make one’s warring brain raise the white flag? Reaching out, she turned on the bedside table light. She wondered if she should get up and make herself a cup of China tea and take a couple Neurophen Plus tablets, to which she had to admit she was becoming quite addicted. Or perhaps she could start reading some really boring book.

  She had the feeling things were getting out of hand somewhat. She didn’t mean only her brother and the shooting in the library. Since her arrival she had been aware of tensions – she had seen conspiratorial looks pass between Ella and Doctor Klein and between Oswald and Feversham. Sybil wasn’t exactly anxious – she was never anxious – it was just a funny feeling she had, that something was about to happen.

  Thank God there’d been no serious damage done to the library. No one read Gibbon anyway and in her opinion the portrait of Charles de Coverley had been greatly improved by the bullet hole. Charles de Coverley was one of her great-great-great uncles. He had been a High Court Judge, something of the sort. A stuffed shirt if there was one, if the portrait was anything to go by. The bullet had got him in the eye and now it looked as though he wore a piratical patch. It gave him a deliciously dissolute air. She’d always hated that portrait anyhow.

  She found herself thinking about the new man, Feversham, whom she had accommodated in the room called ‘Charlotte Russe’.

  She had taken a fancy to him. The moment she had seen him, she’d felt a small secret thrill creeping down her spine. He looked nothing like her brother, but he brought to mind papa. The same raffish charm. She had always had a thing about papa, when she was a girl. Oh dear! Sybil laughed at the memory. She sat up, opened her bedside table drawer and took out a cigarette. She didn’t smoke often, but she felt like it now.

  She recalled how she had always compared papa to her beaux, or rather the other way round – those poor chaps who used to take her out dancing! She had been beastly to them. Far from nice. She had been impossibly imperious and made them do silly things, like pretend they were a polar bear or Harold Macmillan or the Sultan of Zanzibar. When they hesitated or didn’t do it properly, she’d stomped her foot and told them to go away and never come back.

  She’d been terribly picky. Papa had been at his wits’ end. He’d wanted her safely married off to someone suitable. But each time a possible husband was paraded for her inspection, she said no. She’d been terrible! Sometimes she’d said it in French: Non.

  Sybil struck a match and held it to her cigarette. Her hair was in a net and her face covered in cold cream. Most actors were fey violets, but Feversham seemed to be – well, quite the opposite. He was certainly susceptible to feminine charms. Feversham had taken to her in a big way, she did believe. She didn’t think he was after her money or after the island. She could always tell when people were mercenary in their intentions.

  He told her he felt seasick the moment he had boarded Oswald Ramskritt’s yacht, which was a terribly good sign. He then told her she looked like Deborah Kerr, which was a jolly nice thing to say to a lady. Had she seen From Here to Eternity? What about An Affair to Remember? That, as it happened, was one of her favourite films! Coincidence? She didn’t think so! Feversham was a dream that had fallen from Paradise.

  When Sybil was eleven, a witch, or a woman who’d pretended to be a witch, told her that in the last thirty-three years of her life she would find unparalleled happiness with a man whose initial was F. or E. Sybil firmly believed in prophecies. On an earlier occasion the very same woman had told papa that an alien spaceship would land on his island, and it had happened! It had been the year of the Coronation – papa claimed he had seen the saucer’s reflection on the TV screen, as the Archbishop of Canterbury had placed the crown on Princess Elizabeth’s head. The saucer had moved in a gyratory fashion and there had been a sound resembling an organ that was in desperate need of tuning, papa said. Some five minutes later papa had seen the saucer’s reflection again as it had taken off.

  Years later, when papa got caught in the hinge of the door between life and death and had only days left on this earth, he asked Sybil to help him down to the cellar and he showed her the strange
piece of alien equipment, which, he claimed, the aliens had left behind, a most peculiar-looking object, a cross between a toaster and a giant pencil sharpener. Well, it was still there, on a shelf, gathering dust.

  Sybil recalled how she had always wished that her prophecy didn’t come true too soon – she’d have hated it if it had happened when she turned thirty, say, for it would have meant she would die at sixty-three. On the other hand, she wouldn’t have been at all pleased if it had come to her at seventy – the idea of living to be a centenarian-plus filled her with horror. But now – now – was the right time.

  Papa’s tartan gloves. She must give them to Feversham. A long time ago she’d decided she would make a present of papa’s tartan gloves to the man whom she intended to marry.

  Sybil blew out smoke. A woman needed to be given every chance to fulfil herself through those two finest and most honourable of states: matrimony and motherhood. She wasn’t too old for the latter, she didn’t think. It was, after all, the twenty-first century; scientific miracles happened practically every day.

  How old was Feversham? Her age, she imagined, or thereabout. He was divorced, he had informed her apropos of nothing in particular. He’d referred to his former wife as ‘quite the wrong kind of person’. As Sybil had handed him a cup of coffee after dinner, their hands had brushed. He’d also told her he’d sniffed cocaine on a couple of occasions – again, for no apparent reason. It was all terribly promising, to say the least.

  She’d nearly confided in him her penchant for Neurophen Plus – that if one chewed five tablets, say, one felt like – well, like heaven, really – only one had to do it when one did not have a headache.

  Feversham also told her he’d always believed the stage was his vocation, despite the fact he’d been to Gordonstoun and might have had a jolly successful army career.

  Sybil frowned. She remembered that Oswald Ramskritt had sat not far away and that he appeared to be listening to their exchanges. There had been a curious expression on Oswald’s face, one she couldn’t quite make out … Knowing?

  Mrs Garrison-Gore sat fully dressed beside her open window, glaring at the full moon. She was greatly perturbed. In fact, she was in quite a state. She was frightened. She had a sense of impending disaster. She felt threatened. Things had happened, which should never have been allowed to happen. Her life was already full of uncertainties and now a new one had been added. She had been, as she wrote in one of her books, ‘plunged into a tormented conundrum’.

  She tried to pull her mind away from her worries. She thought of Doctor Klein, of what she had seen him do earlier in the day. Doctor Klein’s room was next to hers and they shared a balcony. His side was separated from her side by a low partition. By means of a small mirror which she held in her hand she had managed to spy on him. She was curious about him, extremely curious. Doctor Klein had no idea he was being watched. He had been inside his room, sitting on his bed.

  She had seen him put his hand in his pocket and produce a round object. The next moment she had realised what it was. It was most curious – the last thing she’d expected him to produce – she had watched him, mesmerised – the matter-of-fact way in which he had done it – she didn’t believe beauty came into it – no, a bit late for that – the poor fellow was destined to die a monster – it was something he was eager to conceal.

  She had known at that moment that Doctor Klein had a secret – that there was more to Doctor Klein than met the eye – it was her gypsy blood whispering in her ear – what secret exactly, though?

  Perhaps she could search his room? She didn’t know what she was hoping to find, but she felt sure there would be something. She stood up. She told herself she needed distraction, – the kind of thrills only some risk-involving activity could provide – otherwise she’d go mad with anxiety.

  She had seen Doctor Klein go into Ella’s room and she didn’t think he was back yet; she would have heard him. It was now getting late. It was the small hours of the morning. What did those two find to talk about? Anything in the nature of a romance between Ella and Doctor Klein seemed extremely unlikely, but of course some women had rather unusual tastes, so perhaps she shouldn’t discount the possibility entirely.

  The door of Doctor Klein’s room was locked, but he had left his balcony door ajar, she’d noticed. All she needed to do was climb over the partition and enter his room …

  Raffles in a frock. She was Raffles in a frock. She suppressed a hysterical giggle. She must remember to write this down. Perhaps she could use the phrase in a book? The idea had cheered her up a bit but not an awful lot.

  She opened her balcony door. Perverse and foolish oft I strayed, eh? This must come under the heading of ‘reckless decisions’, she reflected. Well, the last reckless decision she made had paid off, actually. She had hunches, which more often than not proved to be correct. She was aware that her behaviour wasn’t entirely rational, but she knew in her bones that her search would, as they say, bear fruit.

  And it did.

  A couple of minutes later she stood transfixed beside the chest of drawers in Doctor Klein’s room, her skin crawling, her hand clapped over her mouth to prevent herself from crying out, staring down at her discovery …

  13

  DEAD CALM

  On Friday morning Sphinx Island woke up enshrouded in swirls of milky-white mist, at first no more than a delicate translucent veil that kept dissolving, but then it gradually started thickening into a damp impenetrable fog, which rendered the sea invisible. Nor could the sea be heard. The seagulls were quiet too. It was all a little eerie.

  Once more Lady Grylls and Maisie were sitting in the drawing room.

  The clock on the mantelpiece chimed ten-thirty.

  ‘You are an awfully brave gel, my dear. If I’d been you, I’d have screamed the house down. I’d have picked up the phone and called the police right away, though I don’t think that would have been much good, would it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It would have taken them ages to arrive – in the middle of the night – we are, after all, in the middle of the sea – I suppose they have their own boats and things – is there such a thing as coastal police? If that’s what they are called. Must ask Sybil. They must hate it, I am sure they hate it, I mean the police, whenever they get an emergency call from an island. You are looking terribly pale, my dear.’

  Maisie gave a little smile. ‘I didn’t sleep very well.’

  ‘I am not at all surprised. What did you do after he left?’

  ‘I cried a little. I was upset, I guess.’

  ‘I bet you were. You poor thing.’

  ‘I am OK now. I really am.’

  ‘Miss Havisham – that’s who Oswald reminds me of. Remember Miss Havisham? Sometimes I have sick fancies. Trying to get into your bed indeed. You should have screamed the house down. Would you be an angel and pour me another cup of coffee? So cosy sitting here, so quiet – looks as though we are among the clouds – we might be up in Valhalla – one of those places.’ Lady Grylls gestured towards the window. ‘It is jolly sporting of you to have forgiven him. I don’t think he deserves your forgiveness.’

  ‘He was extremely drunk. He couldn’t have known what he was doing, could he? Actually, it wasn’t so very dreadful, apart from the things he said to me.’

  ‘I wish I had your generosity of spirit! My life may not have been a dedicated pursuit of virtue, but there are certain things I draw the line at.’

  ‘OK. It was dreadful but – I mean – nothing happened.’

  ‘I should think not! I would have refused to stay under the same roof with him if it had.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to remember what he said or what he did. You saw him this morning at breakfast, didn’t you? He acted as though nothing had happened. Smiling and talking about the weather and giving me my instructions for the day!’

  ‘Having threatened to throw you out on your ear and make you unemployable!’ Lady Grylls shook her head. ‘I believe he also asked yo
u if you’d heard from your sister in Oregon and how her baby was doing? He sounded genuinely interested, as though he really cared about you. I couldn’t imagine anything creepier.’

  Maisie smiled happily. ‘My sister gave birth last week. Her first baby! I am an aunt!’

  ‘That’s splendid news … Has Oswald ever done anything like that before? Never? How perfectly extraordinary. Sybil says that’s the way some chaps react after they get their heads nearly blown off. Perhaps she is right.’

  ‘I was so frightened … The way Mr de Coverley appeared at the door with that gun!’

  ‘It was the stuff of nightmares, I quite agree.’

  ‘It looked as though he really meant to kill Oswald!’

  ‘I believe he did mean to kill Oswald. John seems to resent his intentions of taking over the island.’

  ‘I thought Mr de Coverley was quite pleasant when I first talked to him. He never used to open his door. Oh it was so funny. He’d ask for something on the house phone and I’d take it to his door, then we’d talk through the keyhole. He said he liked the sound of my voice.’

  ‘Like Pyramus and Thisbe, eh? Could be the start of a romance, you never know. Maybe all John needs is the love of a good woman and then he’ll be right as rain? Or would the age difference be a problem?’

  ‘I saw him watch me through field-glasses from his window.’

  ‘Well, I think that clinches it. Sybil says John’s never been violent before, with people, that is, but then Sybil is the queen of understatement. I do honestly believe he needs to have his head properly examined. Some may say he is ready for the men in white coats. Incidentally, how do you clean those solid silver candelabras?’ Lady Grylls pointed. ‘They become so badly clogged after use, don’t they; it must take hours to get rid of the wax.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not too bad. Ella and I blast them with our hairdryers till the wax runs off on to blotting paper. It only takes a couple of minutes,’ the girl explained cheerfully.