‘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 hundred and one voices, as he had discovered. (Had Quin been a gambler?) His own cards he could no longer use since they had all been cancelled the day after he had ‘died’. Damned frustrating. What was it they said? Reasonable thrift is a virtue when practised by the rich, a dire necessity when practised by the poor. As it happened, he wasn’t used to thrift of any kind, so there.
Neither by training nor by temperament was he fitted to the rigours of everyday life. Never before had he found himself lashed to the masts of actuality. A good many things, mundane, rather banal things, which mere mortals did all the time, he had never done. He had been shielded by his immense wealth and position. He had never been on a double-decker bus, for example, never travelled by tube, never got up early in the morning because he had to, never had to wait to see a doctor or a dentist, never stood in a queue.
At one time, before he’d decided it constituted a gross intrusion into his privacy, he had never dressed in the mornings without the help of a personal valet.
But there was no question of him practising thrift. He was going to claim his legacy very soon now. Then he could do as he pleased. He would be able to satisfy his every whim.
He wouldn’t stay in England, oh no. He hated England. So terribly dull and cold and shoddy and so full of foreigners. He would travel. He wouldn’t stop in a place for more than five days because he would get bored.
Perhaps he would sell his soul to the Devil and achieve immortality. He’d been thinking about it. He had the spell written out on a slip of paper in his breast pocket; the voodoo doctor had assured him that it worked.
He was clad in an immense black cloak with a burgundy silk lining, which imparted to him the air of a stage magician, which in a way he was. (Now you see me, now you don’t.) On his head he wore a homburg, on his eyes tinted glasses. His sideburns were reddish brown. Of course they were not his sideburns. Not strictly speaking. Thinking about his false whiskers cheered him up and he swung his silver-topped cane. He hummed an old-fashioned tune. I am the pride of Piccadilly, the blasé roué.
He rather enjoyed wearing disguise, always had. He found it liberating. Each time he wore disguise he felt like a butterfly that had broken from its chrysalis and taken wing. His disguise at the moment was of the minimal kind. He liked taking risks. He delighted in pushing his luck. It occurred to him that he possessed the full Byronic equipment of noble lineage, unorthodox imagination, a restless spirit and a daring soul.
He found staying at the Ritz irksome; he couldn’t quite put his finger on the reason for it. He didn’t relish walking up and down Piccadilly either. He thought he did, but he didn’t. Too many people of little or no distinction, rather common-looking, in fact; a great stumbling mass; a herd of accursed canaille following their hackneyed inclinations.
He had never been in a crowd before. Nothing as intolerable as a crowd had ever been imposed on his person. He hated to be touched. He’d rather swim Lake Maracaibo than allow himself to be touched. Why did they keep touching him? He felt like raising his stick and hitting out left and right, then right and left. Swish-swish. It would be like topping nettles.
He looked foreign, he supposed, with his bleached eyebrows and polished mahogany complexion, but then most of the people who bumped into him also looked foreign, which wasn’t something he approved of. Not in England, at any rate. It was all too disorienting for words. It gave him a headache.
England was going to the dogs, no doubt about it.
There was nothing like a walk round St James’s, he found, to get his bile flowing. He had always been aware of a strong anti-Establishment streak in him.
He detested the ‘distinguished’ hatters, gunsmiths and boot-makers, the ‘exclusive’ shops selling unbelievably small, exorbitantly priced fiddly bits connected with fly-fishing, the whole area designed predominantly for a certain type of elderly pinstriped pillar of the Establishment. But most of all he hated the gentlemen’s clubs, those middens of priggishness and betrayal.
It was only with great difficulty that he resisted the temptation to pay his old club a visit and wreak some kind of havoc inside. He would have enjoyed smashing a gilded mirror or two with his stick, knocking off old Rees-Mogg’s glasses or punching a hole in that portrait of Baden-Powell. Oh, how his hands itched!
The management had blackballed him a couple of years back, the moralizing morons. He couldn’t remember the reason for his expulsion. Well, he didn’t think much of them either. Smug, small-minded nincompoops, mostly rather inept, quite absurd, leading puzzled, barren lives – like children standing at a grave, searching futilely for the secret of life. He had no patience with them. Not worth his wrath, really.
The moment you learnt to speak, you dedicated your new faculty to unsettling or outraging people. That was what a tedious old uncle of his, long dead, had once told him. His French governess had babbled about his mauvaises habitudes. He had been the proverbial demon child. He remembered Deirdre, his late wife, telling him that he was evil in a rather old-fashioned kind of way, whatever that might mean.
No, he mustn’t do anything that would attract attention. They would most certainly try to arrest him if he did, which would be a bore. He mustn’t let the police take a close look at him. Or, rather, at Peter Quin. Which of course was the same thing. He kept forgetting.
There is no difference between continued affectation and reality. It was Congreve or someone who wrote that.
Yes. Quite.
He sat on a bench in Green Park, yawned prodigiously and stared before him for what seemed an age. He pushed his underlip out petulantly, always an ominous sign to those who knew him. His scowl deepened. He was bored. A dark despondency had him in its grip and he could see no future for the human race. He’d been hurl’d from th’ethereal sky, down to this bottomless perdition, here to dwell. Not in adamantine chains and penal fire, true, though that afforded him little consolation.
He hated being at a loose end. He felt like a shark out of water. He had an acute sense of anticlimax. He didn’t think anonymity suited his temperament. Despatching couriers with horns to clear the roads for his passage would have been more his style.
Gripping his silver-topped stick between his gloved hands, he thrashed at a pigeon. His mood then suddenly improved. He rose. Moments later he was back in Piccadilly, standing in front of a shop window, admiring his reflection. He reminded himself that he belonged to that stratospheric breed of men to whom the world was but a lump of clay, infinitely pliable to their wants and whims.
‘What I want,’ he mouthed at his reflection, ‘is a pair of wings. Black wings. They’ve got to be black.’
He found exactly the kind of wings he wanted half an hour later at a little shop in Covent Garden, which specialized in different kinds of theatrical paraphernalia. Bla
ck wings, something funereal about them, rather sinister, exactly as he had envisaged them.
‘Are these real feathers? I like the feel of feathers nearly as much as I like the feel of fur. I am going to wear ’em, you know,’ he said as he watched the young man place the wings inside a rectangular tulip-red box. ‘Soon.’
The shop assistant, accustomed to eccentric customers, gave a polite smile.
Looking round at the grinning masks on the shelves, he thought of the Grimaud. He hadn’t seen the arrival of the magnificent white hearse drawn by plumed horses, but the knowledge that it had been there was enough for him. He liked putting on a show even when he was not around to see it.
Purchasing the wings put him in a state of reckless excitement. He attempted to trip up a barbaric blob of a woman with his stick and stuck out his tongue at a little boy, then had a Cuba Libre with gin at the Criterion, which further raised his spirits, though he intensely disliked the girl who served him.
The silly creature was plump and she seemed to find the sight of him comical, for some reason. The flaming cheek of it! She had clapped her hand over her mouth.
He eyed her with a glare of indescribable malignancy, which only seemed to provide her with further amusement. His face turned the colour of raspberry jam. The impudent hussy clearly had no idea who he was; she couldn’t possibly know that his pedigree had been established in a direct line by genealogists from the year 65 of the Christian era and that he had been brought up in a house where most objects had at one time or other been owned or handled by a king or an emperor! He nearly complained to the management about her but decided against it. Fuss was so middle-class.
He would stay at Remnant a while. Not for too long, goodness, no. He would be bored. But he would stay long enough.
His thoughts turned to Clarissa. Clarissa was not plump. Far from it. Clarissa was imperially slender, with the delicious, delicate curves of a succubus fashioned in dreams …
I am a traveller in an arid desert, he thought, but there is an oasis in sight.
He would drive. He would rent a car. Apart from Clarissa, there would be no one else at Remnant. No servants. Not even Tradewell, who had always gazed at him with a rather pathetic expression of awed devotion on his face. He had instructed Clarissa to keep the place empty and she had done so.
He had felt an unaccustomed leaning towards caution. Was he getting old? He hated the idea of encroaching old age. The funny thing was that he didn’t feel he was sliding into his dotage. He felt energized, rejuvenated. He had started experiencing the kind of desires that had troubled him as young man …
The powder. The powder seemed to be working. Freshly aborted human foetuses. That was what the voodoo doctor had told him. Strange-looking fellow, jet-black, with peculiar orange-yellow eyes, like a cat’s, veined with purple, but he clearly knew what he was talking about.
He now felt drawn towards Remnant Castle as if by some magnetic force. He would start early tomorrow morning, some time after four.
The hour between the first lightening of the morning sky and sunrise was his most auspicious time, the voodoo fellow had told him. It was then that his energies were at their most vibrant and his aura most vividly coloured, apparently.
He rather liked the idea of arriving at a house submerged in murk, or as morning came to consciousness and light crept up between the shutters …
He would sneak in through a side door and go up the stairs, past the portraits of his savage, wily, fearless ancestors. He had no doubt his ancestors would have approved not only of what he had done, but also of what he was planning to do.
He was a true Remnant. His brother, on the other hand, was not. The fact that Gerard had turned up at La Sorcière on the night of the murder suggested little more than misguided bravado. A damned ineffectual chap, Gerard, like all bookish chaps. As a boy his brother had been potty about the Arthurian legend and perhaps he had seen himself as that flower of chivalry, Sir Lancelot, on a white warhorse, charging the Monster of Remnant, lance at the ready!
There had been a full moon that night and he had seen Gerard from his dressing-room window. Had Gerard travelled all the way to Grenadin intent on committing fratricide? Who could tell? If he had, he’d been too late!
Once more he looked into the near future and saw himself arriving at Remnant Castle, striding stealthily down the corridor towards Clarissa’s bedroom. Clarissa would be in her bed. She would still be sleeping. He would open her bedroom door – he’d be able to hear her breathing, perhaps he’d see the rising and falling of her bosom …
He experienced another surge of youthful energy.
The once-familiar flame. He might have swallowed a dose of ethyl chloride … Why, he hadn’t felt like that for years.
30
The Criminal Comedy of the Complicit Couple
Clarissa woke with a start. It was terribly early, she could tell. Her heart was thumping wildly in her chest. I am on my own, she thought.
As she further drifted into consciousness, she heard the wind outside, alternately moaning and howling, hurling itself against the window panes like some demented monster intent on breaking in and devouring her.
She had had a dream. She’d seen a mouse on the floor, obviously ill, huddled and shivering, so in order to give it a quick death, she picked it up by the tail and threw it into a puddle of water. She’d heard a voice. Don’t you see that the water is not deep enough? The wretched thing won’t drown; it will just go on swimming about. So she picked the mouse out of the puddle, but as she did so the mouse twisted round and bit her finger. She heard the voice again. That mouse has a disease and now you will get it.
Thinking about it, she felt nauseous, ill. She looked down at her fingers. The only too familiar feeling of impending disaster was upon her, the sense of being poised on the very edge of chaos, the conviction that she’d never be free from the tentacles of her impossible predicament—
What time was it? Half past three? Christ.
Reaching out for the silver-plated radio on her bedside table, she turned it on. She liked listening to the BBC World Service. It soothed her …
But she found it hard to concentrate. Her ordeal, she reminded herself, was only just starting. Should she take one of her pills?
Clarissa began to pray to God. She spoke the words aloud.
She promised never to have another affair as long as she lived. She would never dine at the Ritz again. She was going to take proper care of Stephan. She would devote the rest of her life to Stephan. She wouldn’t wear lipstick in the morning. She would never wear stilettos again. She would be nice to Aunt Hortense—
‘How to murder someone and get away with it … You see, in Keldorp I shared living quarters with a little man called Harrison—’
What was that? Sounded like some creepy radio drama. Should she change the station? Quite interesting, actually—
She listened.
‘Harrison was one of the most boring people I have ever met. Except on one subject. Murder. I don’t mean he killed anyone himself. He was fascinated by the theory of it. He must have read every book ever printed on the subject. One night he told me he’d worked out the perfect murder. It all depended on one thing. The murderer had to have an accomplice. Someone he could trust absolutely. Someone who wanted – who needed – to kill as much as he did—’
Wanted to kill as much as he did … No, that didn’t quite apply to her. She had aided and abetted the killer, true, but that was after the murder had been committed.
The fact was, she had had no idea there was going to be a murder. If she had known Stephan had got hold of Roderick’s gun, she would have done something about it – she would have taken the gun away from him. Of course she would have.
An idea began advancing from the shadows of Clarissa’s mind slowly, gradually, like a figure emerging from a dark cave …
The codicil. The five million pounds to Peter Quin. The codicil suggested that the murder might have been carefully thought throu
gh, premeditated, planned in detail. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? It suggested that it wasn’t Stephan, poor thing, who had committed the murder, but her monster of a husband …
Yes.
She gasped. She saw it very clearly now. Roderick had lured Peter Quin to La Sorcière with the sole intention of killing him. She had believed it was Stephan who killed Quin, mistaking him for Roderick, and Roderick had encouraged her to continue thinking it because it had suited his book …
That night she had agreed to everything he told her to do; she had nodded and said yes; she had been dazed, confused, in a state of shock. Roderick told her that the idea had just occurred to him as he stood looking down at Quin’s dead body – but that had been a lie.
She had been blind – yes, blind!
Roderick had meant things to happen that way all along.
She heard the voice on the radio announce the end of the play and she rose, propping herself on her elbow. She reached out for her pale pink kimono. She put it on and sat up in bed. She was extremely cold. Her teeth chattered. The heating wasn’t working properly – but it wasn’t only the heating – she felt a chill – a particular kind of chill – there had been a sound as well—
The next moment she knew.
He was at Remnant.
She saw her bedroom door open. She had locked it, but he clearly had a key. She should have barricaded herself in. Why did all the good ideas come when it was too late?
Murder of Gonzago Page 17
