Murder at the Villa Byzantine chm-6

by R. T. Raichev

  Antonia and Payne stood up. Their visit was at an end. They hadn’t heard anyone call.

  31

  Divided We Stand

  It was a bland golden morning, but oh so deceitful! At around eight o’clock the sky was as bright as a jewel and she stood in the back garden, holding up her hands to the sun, but then suddenly and without any warning a mist descended between her and the brilliant young red willow and chilled her to the bone. Quarter of an hour later the electric coffee pot gave her an electric shock, which for a minute or two staggered her considerably. Such an alarming kind of pain, she thought – a kind of abstract snakebite.

  She heard Melisande moan in her room – what was she saying? Watch over her in the Labyrinth… Protect her from the Voices… Protect her from the Visions. Were those lines from a play or a prayer? For whose protection was her sister pleading? Had Melisande got it into her head that Winifred might be in danger? Had Melisande lost her mind completely?

  The night before, Winifred had started putting her plan into action.

  She had phoned Tancred and arranged to meet him at the British Library. He had sounded taken aback, poor boy, but he had agreed to it. She had pretended to be the Other – that ridiculous Miss Hope! She said she had something of vital importance to impart to him. A matter of life and death, no less. It was a melodramatic way of putting it and she had spoken breathlessly. It was not Miss Hope’s usual style, but then old ladies were notoriously unpredictable. Oh, how she hated Miss Hope! How she despised her. Well, today was going to be Miss Hope’s last outing. Yes.

  Winifred Willard laughed happily. It wouldn’t be so very odd for a woman in her early eighties to disappear suddenly and without a trace, would it? Miss Hope might stumble into some black hole – the kind of place where bogus nannies vanished, perhaps? The Hole of Lost Hope?

  Two hours later, still laughing, she walked out of the front door of Kinderhook.

  The world is remorseless, vast, inexorable in its operations – and Tancred needs protection from it.

  Her lips moved as she walked briskly down the street and hailed a taxi with her umbrella. He needs me, she whispered. He needs me. He needs me.

  The thought gave her wings.

  She was on her way to correct her mistake. Her one folly. It was imperative that she remove the one obstacle to their happiness. What she had done, she would undo.

  ‘St John’s Wood,’ she told the taxi driver. ‘Place called the Villa Byzantine. I’d be happy to direct you. Or perhaps you know it? It is the most striking house. Like something out of a fairy tale.’

  At the conclusion of their last meeting, Tancred had told her that his editor had contacted a Professor Goldsworthy – an authority on European royalty in exile who apparently knew everything there was to know about the Bulgarian royal family and life at the palace in Sofia between the wars – and asked him to take a look at what Tancred had written so far. Tancred had said he would send all his notes to Professor Goldsworthy by the end of the week – electronically – as an attachment.

  The news had come to Winifred as a shock. She realized that Goldsworthy would see at once that Miss Hope’s ‘reminiscences’ were nothing but brazen fabrications. Goldsworthy was sure to say that, to the best of his knowledge, no such person as ‘Miss Hope’ had ever existed. Poor Tancred would be made to look an incompetent fool. Even though it was all Miss Hope’s fault, some blame would invariably attach to him. His publishers – the immeasurably insignificant Fleur-de-Lis Press – might start questioning Tancred Vane’s integrity, the trustworthiness of his previous royal biographies. They might decide they didn’t want to commission any more books from him. Poor Tancred would be distraught, devastated. Royal biographies were his life!

  No. She couldn’t allow any of that to happen. She needed to undo the damage. She would certainly make a clean breast of what she’d done – nothing but a full confession would do! She would explain to Tancred – humbly and apologetically – the exact reason she had acted the way she had – but she would do it in her own time. Not under duress. Not as a result of ‘exposure’. She would confess to Tancred after they had been married a month or two, perhaps. Yes. She was sure Tancred would understand. Of course he would understand. To love was to forgive.

  Tancred loved her.

  But the book – that so-called biography – had to disappear first.

  She intended to make it look like an accident. One of those unaccountable calamities. Writing was known to disappear from computers without a trace. She had heard the most incredible stories. Viruses were often blamed for it. The Trojan Horse. The Bayley Bitch. She laughed. Such outlandish names!

  She also intended to take the notebook in which Tancred had recorded everything she told him – all those preposterous stories she had made up! The notebook would also disappear without a trace. She would burn it, then scatter the ashes.

  Winifred had no qualms about what she was going to do.

  ‘I think someone’s interested in you,’ the taxi driver said, his eyes on the mirror.

  ‘You are absolutely right. Someone is interested in me. I regard myself as an extremely fortunate woman,’ Winifred said happily. She didn’t quite hear what the driver said next – something about a car tailing them?

  That was an odd little episode last night, she thought. She had to admit she didn’t quite know what to make of it. Hugh and Antonia were a highly civilized couple of the kind she and Tancred would be very soon. Hugh and Antonia seemed to suspect Miss Hope of beheading Stella. It was Hugh who had voiced the suspicion. Although Antonia had said nothing, it was clear her mind was working along the same lines.

  One had only to look at them and one immediately knew how close they were, how alike. Two minds with but a single thought. Like her and Tancred. One didn’t often come across couples that moved in such perfect harmony. Perhaps when she and Tancred had been imparadised in one another’s arms, as Milton so aptly put it, they would become best friends with the Paynes? They had so much in common! They could visit the theatre together, then dine at Le Caprice or the Ivy. They would have the most interesting and stimulating conversations about literature and the arts and the crowned heads of Europe.

  Hugh had such a straight nose and such steady blue eyes. She had noticed at once not only his fine features, but also the lineaments of intellectual power, even of nobility. She also liked the way he parted his hair. It was of course Hugh’s intelligence that had impressed her most. Hugh simply bristled with ideas. Not a common feature of military men, she reflected, certainly not of majors. The only thing that bristled in the majors she had once known was their moustaches! Winifred laughed and pretended to cough when she saw the driver glance at her curiously.

  Hugh was very much the gentleman scholar type. She could see his finely boned head bent over an outsize edition of the OED, a magnifying glass in his hand, though he would look equally good on the moor. On the moor he would be clad in a Victorian shooting jacket in heavy blue and grey tweed, belted and with four patch pockets with the flaps buttoned down, a light blue shirt, red tie (the only vaguely rakish element in his attire), dark grey corduroy trousers and black gloves. Hugh would be surrounded by adoring dogs and of course he would be smoking his pipe.

  Well, if she had not already been spoken for, she might have fallen for Hugh. Winifred smiled. Cliches had a comic charm of their own!

  Would Tancred be jealous if he suspected her of falling for another man? Tancred seemed always so terribly preoccupied with his literary efforts, forever in a world of his own, but Winifred felt certain he would become jealous if she were to give him cause to be – not that she ever would!

  She remembered how, on entering the Villa Byzantine for the very first time, she had stood inside the hall that smelled so sweetly of beeswax, rose petals and lavender, how she had spread out her arms and thought, I have arrived.

  As a matter of fact, Hugh and Antonia were right to suspect Miss Hope of having killed Stella. Winifred nodded to herself. S
he wouldn’t put anything past that faded spinster with her phoney pince-nez and her Ivy Compton-Burnett hairnet.

  Miss Hope was already guilty of deception on a grand scale. Miss Hope’s accounts of life at the royal palace in Sofia were nothing but a figment of her warped imagination. A farrago of lies. Miss Hope had blended fact and fiction – like the story of Prince Cyril’s affair with a cabaret singer. Well, Cyril had had an affair with a cabaret singer called Victoria – one of many – but he had never actually had her living in a lodge in the grounds of his brother’s palace.

  There had been no lodge, as Tancred had so cleverly discovered. And of course Prince Cyril had never had a son called Clement – or Clemmie, as Miss Hope insisted on referring to him. Prince Cyril had never played with a samurai sword, nor had he been an Edgar Wallace aficionado. Miss Hope had made all that up. Miss Hope was nothing but a delirious fabulist, a serial liar.

  Winifred had given the matter very careful consideration and reached the conclusion that it wouldn’t be inappropriate if it was Miss Hope herself who undid the damage she had done. The architect who constructs a poor edifice should do the demolition job herself. Why should Winifred do somebody else’s dirty work?

  Besides, Miss Hope needed to be punished. Yes. Miss Hope had become too big for her boots. Miss Hope was turning into a proper nuisance. Miss Hope seemed to have got it into her head that Tancred was in love with her. Call me Catherine, indeed!

  Winifred looked into the mirror. Miss Hope’s carefully arranged white hair was as stiff as a wig, her hairnet was in place, the lines on either side of her mouth were deeper than ever before, which suggested that not only age but her sins as well had finally caught up with her, only this time she was wearing her gold-rimmed half-moon glasses, not the pince-nez with the black ribbon.

  Winifred was going to make sure that Miss Hope did the right thing. She would watch over her like the proverbial hawk. Miss Hope was tricky. There were indications that Miss Hope didn’t like the idea of reaping what she had sown. That must be the reason for her looking so down in the mouth. Miss Hope was feeling humiliated and she resented it. Oh, how she resented it!

  Miss Hope might be tempted to cause greater destruction than she needed, out of sheer spite. Smash Tancred’s computer with her umbrella – reduce Tancred’s Chinamen to smithereens – splash ink all over Tancred’s gold-and-green study – rip his curtains apart, even! It would be the final flick of the serpent’s tail.

  Desecrating Tancred’s den, the lovely Pupil Room, would be an act of wanton malevolence, but Winifred wouldn’t put anything past Miss Hope. No, I mustn’t take any chances with her, Winifred thought. She didn’t care for the malicious glint in Miss Hope’s eye. There was also something sly and calculating about Miss Hope’s expression. Did the old witch believe she could outwit her?

  Did Miss Hope kill the preposterous Stella and then plant Winifred’s handkerchief beside the body? That was a definite possibility. Miss Hope must hate Winifred as much as she hated Miss Hope. That hadn’t always been the case, though. Winifred frowned. She had a vague notion that a link of some kind existed between them…

  Winifred found herself thinking of the day Stella died. It had been a Tuesday. She couldn’t say what she had done that day. Her memory was a complete blank. The only thing she remembered was returning all the manuscripts her publishers had asked her to read and evaluate with a note saying she was too busy, dealing with an important private matter.

  (Could she have been at the Villa Byzantine that day?)

  ‘Where did you say the house was, madam?’ Winifred heard the taxi driver’s voice. ‘What number?’

  ‘Further down the road… I don’t think there is a number… Yes, that’s it. You can stop here. It’s only a short distance.’

  ‘Is that a tunnel? Blimey. Wouldn’t you like me to drive you to the house?’

  ‘No, thank you, my good man. There’s nothing I enjoy better than a bracing walk,’ she said crisply. ‘It’s such fine weather.’

  ‘Looks like rain,’ he muttered.

  ‘I have my trusty old umbrella with me.’

  ‘There may be a storm.’

  ‘So kind of you to care, but I am not in the least afraid of storms.’

  She paid him and got out. What an impudent fellow! She glanced up with narrowed eyes. The skies glared down at her like the polished interior of an angry oyster shell. ‘The many-splendoured weather of an English day,’ she heard Miss Hope murmur.

  Winifred remained silent. She hadn’t liked the way the driver had been looking at her. She feared he might decide to linger and spy on her… Follow her even… No – he was gone… Thank God!

  She entered the tunnel. Above her, sinister yews spread their sombre branches like the roof-span of a crypt. She thought, I must be very careful now. I am dealing with a woman who is as unpredictable as she is unbalanced.

  Halfway down the tunnel of trees she heard what sounded like the slamming of a car door somewhere.

  32

  The Exterminating Angel

  A lugubrious El Greco horizon suffused with inky rain – a sudden flash of lightning darting across the sky, then a second one. The driver had mentioned a storm. It’s the kind of setting that lends itself to melodrama, she thought.

  Under the low-hanging clouds the Villa Byzantine loomed, gloom-shrouded and desolate. More yews – thick and black and forbidding. Why did she keep noticing yews? Yews were said to be symbols of death.

  An earlier splash of rain had soaked the fallen leaves into a paste of dark slush under her feet. Miss Hope exclaimed, ‘Oh dear, look at me. Up to my eyes in mud. People will think I have been playing catch-as-catch-can with pigs!’

  Winifred Willard didn’t say a word. She stood by the front door, opened her handbag and took out the key. She had managed to have a replica made of one of Tancred’s keys – she’d never told him, but she didn’t think he would mind. No, of course he wouldn’t.

  She unlocked the door and went in. She stood in the hall and breathed in the sweet smell of lavender, beeswax and pot-pourri. She smiled again, remembering those fifties American films. Honey, I’m home! It was always the husband who said it, the wife was invariably in the kitchen, baking a cake.

  There was a clap of thunder. All the window panes rattled. Although it was only morning, the hall was dark. She didn’t really like this house. It had a certain – atmosphere. She wouldn’t have called it a happy house. No. The sooner Tancred got rid of it, the better.

  ‘Now this is what I want you to do. Please listen very carefully. I would be extremely grateful if you didn’t interrupt.’

  Winifred had spoken with strange incisiveness. Happening to glance into the tall silver-framed mirror on the wall, she noted that Miss Hope’s face was now quite expressionless.

  ‘Would you stop for a moment, please?’

  But Miss Hope didn’t stop. She pretended she hadn’t heard. It was clear that Miss Hope resented being told what to do. She was stubborn as a mule. They started going up the stairs.

  The front door opened noiselessly and was shut at once.

  (If she had glanced back over her shoulder Winifred would have seen the killer, but she didn’t.)

  The killer stood in the shadow of the grandfather clock and listened as Winifred Willard proceeded to give instructions to Miss Hope.

  ‘Everything must disappear. Some of it is bona fide, which is a shame. I am sure you know that Tancred did have other sources of information, you were not the only one. I am talking about reliable sources, but it is all mixed up with your lies – so it is no good.’

  (Talking to herself, the killer thought.)

  ‘Tancred will be so upset,’ Miss Hope bleated. ‘Can’t we keep some of it?’

  ‘I am afraid we can’t. There is no way round it,’ Winifred said. ‘Allow one rotten apple in – and the whole barrel is contaminated.’

  ‘Tancred will be devastated.’

  ‘Tancred will understand. It will be a shock at f
irst, but he will understand. I will explain everything to him. What good are bogus biographies to anybody?’

  ‘Some people would read anything. Books with titles like Reheated Cabbage and Pregnant Widows.’

  ‘Should such people be encouraged?’ I don’t know why I am talking to her, Winifred thought.

  ‘Tancred will have a nervous breakdown.’

  ‘He won’t. Tancred is a young man. He is strong and resilient.’

  The door to Pupil Room was open. The owl doorstop was in place, preventing the door from shutting. The doorstop was in the shape of an owl whose solemn bespectacled face, it suddenly struck Winifred, looked uncannily like that of Miss Hope.

  Pupil Room was sunk in gloom. The curtains were half-drawn across the windows. The moment she entered, a flash of lightning lit the study with searchlight brilliance and while it lingered, dimming and brightening, for a split second too bright to look at, the inevitable thunder rolled and cracked.

  Winifred crossed to the desk and switched on a brassbase table lamp. She glanced at the book that lay on the desk. Waiting for Princess Margaret. An anti-memoir, Tancred had called it. Flawed but fascinating. Winifred’s eyes strayed to the petunias in the small vase – they were quite dead now. Tancred’s ‘domestic help’ was far from efficient. Winifred pursed her lips. When they were married, she’d give the slouch the sack.

  Her eyes passed over a sepia photograph showing Hitler shaking King Boris’ hand. Tancred believed the photograph had been taken in 1943, at the start of the fatal visit. Boris had died soon after his return from Germany. There had been rumour and endless speculation that Hitler had had something to do with the death…

  Winifred turned on the computer. As she waited for the icons to come up, another clap of thunder shook the windows and the next moment the rain came, a battering kind of sound, like a hail of bullets… It was a firing squad that had executed Prince Cyril… There seemed to be reminders of death everywhere today… There had been a dead mole in the garden that morning… Winifred had put on her gardening gloves, picked it up, wrapped it in an old copy of the Telegraph and dropped it in the bin. She was not the least bit squeamish.