The Once and Future Con

by Peter Guttridge

  "So how does everyone know Faye's brother knocked off Frome?"

  "Do you remember what staircase Frome was on?"

  "Staircase A, West Quad."

  "Do you know who else was on that staircase?"

  "After all this time-come on.,,

  "It was alphabetical wasn't it, rooms for students were parcelled out in alphabetical order starting at staircase A?"

  "Askwith," I said, not because I knew but because it suddenly all made sense. "Askwith saw it and promised to keep quiet about it if Faye would marry him-the bastard."

  Genevra was quiet for a few moments but I could see her eyes behind her mask. She was watching me intently.

  "What?" I said. "There's more?"

  "You tell me," she said cautiously.

  I shrugged.

  "I'm out of my depth and my rubber ring has a hole in it."

  "In light of all that's been happening since, do you think Askwith's death was an accident?"

  She continued to look at me intently.

  "What are you getting at," I said. "You mean that Faye offed her husband?"

  I recalled with a sinking feeling Bridget's remarks about seeing Faye and her husband going off together.

  "Have you been talking to Bridget?"

  "Frequently, but not about this."

  "But why would Faye do it now?" I asked. "She'd been married to him for years."

  Like the devil, Bridget sometimes appears when you say her name.

  "You dancing?" she shouted, grabbing Genevra's arm.

  "Not just now-" Genevra started to say but Bridget didn't hear her and continued to tug.

  "You'd better stay there until they do the rowing boat song, Nick," Bridget called back, cackling. Cackling. She was drunk then.

  Genevra looked back over her shoulder.

  "Wait for me," she called.

  I waited and watched, hoping for a sign that would show me Faye or her brother. I was conscious that others too were merely watching. And because they, like me, were masked, there was something unsettling about their blank-faced stillness.

  My mind was spinning from the things Genevra had told me and the sure feeling that she was probably right. I was leaning my head against the marble statue behind me and looking up at the massive chandelier suspended from the middle of a fierce battle scene when I became conscious of a slight commotion at the main entrance. I looked over.

  The blood-bedewed masquer I'd seen in the gondola some hours before had entered, walking stiffly between the two companions I had seen board the boat at the Daniell. People parted to let him pass. There were some murmurs of disapproval-the blood looked very fresh-but the party soon swallowed him up.

  Except that I kept a watch on him. He toured the room, walking in his stiff, frail way. He passed within two yards of me and I could see his two companions lightly supporting him. I noticed the stubble beneath the powder and rouge of the one who passed closest to me.

  I had no doubt the person who had come as the Red Death was Ralph and I was equally certain that I knew why he had got in touch with Faye after all these years.

  As I watched Ralph, I saw a tall, slender harlequin detach himself from a small group of people and follow him. The harlequin walked neatly, almost heel to toe. I'd found Faye, too.

  I followed at a distance. In a room with a brightly decorated ceiling and walls hung with vast, doomy canvases, I saw the harlequin approach the Red Death. They spoke for a moment then moved off together. Ralph's two companions watched them go through a door in the far wall.

  I skirted the room and, when I was sure the two (wo)men weren't watching, also slipped out of the door.

  I was in a stairwell with steps going both up and down. I listened and thought I heard shuffling footsteps above me. I mounted the stairs after them, as quietly as my squeaking waders would allow.

  The floor above had not been open to the public for some years but the rooms were still laid out as in a museum. Security lights dimly glowed. The rooms were arranged in a complex way so that passage from one to another meant continual turns and twists. For the most part they were bedrooms, private chambers, and studies.

  From the windows I occasionally caught a glimpse of the Grand Canal. Fireworks were arcing into the sky and bursting in enormous showers of color. But the walls of the Ca' Rezzonica were thick and it was like watching a silent film. More usually the windows looked over dank alleys or narrow, dark canals. I took my mask off.

  I found Faye standing by a four-poster bed in a small bedroom. The short bed covered with a richly embroidered counterpane and drapes of fading chenille was on a shallow platform. Faye had taken her mask off. She was staring at the bed, tracing with her finger a delicate convolvulus of golden thread along the bolster. She was unaware of me until I stepped closer. She heard the squeak and jerked her head round.

  "Where's Ralph?" I said.

  "Rafe," she said automatically.

  It was very hot in the room. I loosened my cloak and dropped it on the bed.

  "Faye, I know about you and Ralph, about you and Askwith."

  "Know what?" she said, looking up then suddenly bursting out laughing. There was a tinge of hysteria to her laughter.

  "It's okay," I said. "I know they look weird. I can't get them off."

  "You need scissors."

  "Why, Faye?"

  "Have you seen Ralph?"

  I nodded.

  "He's-"

  "I know. I'm sorry"

  Hot tears spilled from her eyes. I felt like crying, too. Instead I stood watching her, keeping the bed between us.

  "Askwith claimed he'd seen what happened. I thought that was why Ralph had gone. Askwith said he'd go to the police if I didn't agree to be his ... companion. Even then, he couldn't ... but there were other things ... . Then worse than that, when Ralph tried to get in touch with me Askwith forbade it. All these years wasted. I thought he was dead. And now ..."

  "I figured something like that had happened," I said. "And I'm really sorry. But what you're saying gives both you and Ralph a pretty strong motive for killing your husband. Which one of you did it?"

  "I don't think I'm capable of killing anyone," a frail voice said. I turned. It was Ralph in his blood-bedewed costume. He'd taken his mask off but, aside from the blood, his ravaged face didn't look much different. It had a ghastly pallor. Faye looked at him then looked away, tears still falling.

  "Nor have I ever been. I came back to see Faye. And my son. Before I ..."

  "Die," I said.

  Ralph smiled briefly.

  "Hello, Nick. Nice waders. You look well."

  "I wish I could say the same," I said with feeling.

  He shrugged.

  "I'm just a boy who can't say no."

  I gestured at the bloody outfit.

  "Pretty crude metaphor, isn't it?"

  "Spoken like a true Englishman," he said. "AIDS is a pretty crude disease. Sorry if it offends you, old chap."

  "I didn't mean that-"

  "I've been reading all day of deeds of valor," he said. "Of the fatal love of Lancelot for Guinevere and the incestuous passion of Arthur and Morgause, Queen of the Orkneys." He looked at Faye. "I wanted to find a way to make amends to her. I did see Askwith at the college. To confront him. He just laughed."

  "But why didn't you come forward earlier and deny killing Frome?"

  "I didn't know until I heard from Faye that people had been thinking I'd somehow killed dear old Bernard."

  "But-"

  "Don't you understand, Nick?" Faye said. "No, you have no family, why would you know? How could you?" She raised her hands and let them fall wearily. "Family secrets, Nick. So much is kept hidden. It simply wasn't talked about. Ever. By anybody. The official verdict on Bernard was accidental death and we all maintained that, just as we all maintained the fiction that Joseph was mine and Askwith's child."

  "Then if Ralph didn't kill Askwith-" I began.

  Faye looked at me sorrowfully. I heard a door slant somewh
ere.

  "Then it must have been me?" She shook her head. "I thought of killing myself. Often. But never Askwith. And I couldn't kill myself because of Joseph, my son."

  "Then Askwith did die accidentally?" I said. "He and Frome both?"

  "No," Ralph said, sinking down on the bed. "Just as Frome's death was not accidental."

  "You did kill him?"

  Ralph shook his head.

  "Look," I said. "I feel like a ping-pong ball here being bounced all over the table. Could you just tell it straight?"

  "Of course, Nick, of course." Ralph paused as if to gain his strength. "I was with Bernard when he died. We'd spent the afternoon together. A large amount of alcohol had been consumed. We were disturbed by a violent banging on the door and demands that we open up. I assume the racket is what drew Askwith from his room on the floor above.

  "Frome wasn't my lover, I was just one of his seductions. The irony was I'd gone to see him because he was my moral tutor-immoral tutor would be more accurate-to ask what I should do about Faye and the baby. I needed a confessor but I couldn't see the padre understanding. Frome, naughty man, poured drink down my throat and then offered me comfort.

  "It was my regular male lover at the door. He was a very jealous person. Frome answered the door but went outside, to protect me I suppose. There were harsh words and I went to the door just in time to see my lover deliberately push Frome down the stairs. Frome cracked his head on one of the steps as he went down. When he stopped falling, he just lay crumpled in the angle of the stairs, in a pool of blood, his head at a terrible angle. It was awful, terrible. I used to faint at the sight of blood."

  He twisted his mouth into a grimace and indicated his blood-bedewed gowns.

  "Ironic, eh?"

  He paused.

  "I left that evening, promising my lover I wouldn't say anything. I didn't know that Askwith had seen. The police knew Frome had been with someone but not who that someone was. The college wanted to hush it up-they could see the newspaper headlines: Immoral Tutor in Love Trysts with Student Lovers and so on-so no one made much of a fuss when the verdict of accidental death came in."

  I expelled my breath slowly.

  "You seem to be missing one thing out," I said. "Who was your lover?"

  Ralph looked surprised.

  "Sorry, Nick, I thought you knew. Everybody else did. It was Reggie. Reggie Williamson? Lord Williamson of Fleming?"

  Reggie Williamson had killed Bernard Frome. But if Askwith had really seen what happened, why hadn't he put the bite on Williamson? Ali. Things began to click into place. I recalled bumping into Williamson as he came out of his meeting with Askwith in the college library. He looked rattled. Askwith had tried to blackmail him.

  Suddenly Williamson seemed the likeliest candidate for Askwith's murderer. I recalled seeing him alone in the quadrangle. And what about Lucy? I'd thought he and Lucy might have had an affair. The fact that he was gay didn't necessarily negate that theory. Everybody was being so bloody polymorphously perverse.

  If Williamson had killed Lucy too, then he was my serial killer. I shivered. From Williamson's comment about the armor, I was assuming he realized that I'd heard that snippet of conversation between him and Rex outside the barn on the night of the joust.

  Given his evident ruthlessness, that put me right in the firing line. I looked at Faye and Ralph. I wasn't the only one.

  "Does Williamson know you're back in circulation?" I said to Ralph. He and Faye exchanged glances. Before they could speak we all heard the clatter of footsteps on the corridor behind us.

  "Cone on," I said, grabbing my cloak and leading the way into the next room. It was a hexagonal changing room with a mirror on each wall and behind the mirror hanging space for gowns and dresses.

  "Faye, you two hide in one of these," I whispered. "I'll lead him away."

  Faye shook her head.

  "We're in this together."

  "Well, put your masks back on then. He might not realize who you are."

  Ralph looked down at his distinctive costume.

  "Good idea," he said.

  I caught sight of myself in the yellow waders in one of the mirrors. I definitely wouldn't bother.

  "Why can't we just see what he has to say?" Ralph complained. "I'm sure he doesn't mean us harm."

  "I'm sure he does," I said, going through into a passage some fifteen yards in length. "We can hear what he has to say when we're back downstairs with everyone else."

  We tiptoed past a series of disturbing paintings of a masked ball. Each featured tall, gaunt harlequins at a masquerade looking almost as if they were warders. In one, masquers, frozen in postures of alarm, turned to stare at an open door where a harlequin passed by. What stood out in all the pictures was the lack of gaiety in this masquerade. There was no dancing, no drinking, no movement.

  We passed through a short T-shaped apartment filled with glass cabinets displaying examples of eighteenth century costume, complete with those dominoes and stiff masks depicted in the paintings we had just seen. I paused to listen for signs of pursuit. All I could hear was the rain as it began a light rataplan across the palace windows.

  We came into a chamber decked out as an alchemist's laboratory. Two red emergency lights glowed dimly in the ceiling. They cast a curious glow on the benches loaded with primitive chemical apparatus: crucibles, cupels, flasks, retorts, and bowls. Books lined one wall; jars and bottles lined another. Some of the jars were marked: cinnabar, argentvive, azoth, white water, and aqua fortis. On the floor were bellows, wooden casks, a pelican. A small furnace was set into one wall.

  Faye and I were supporting Ralph, our pace dictated by his slow shuffle. We entered a suite of small rooms, each room no more than six feet square but some fifteen feet in height. They led one into the other. The sixth room was hexagonal and seemed to be a dead end.

  I looked back anxiously, then surveyed the room. A perverse hand had etched an army of hunchbacks across the ceiling and down the walls. Hundreds of punchinellos dancing a strange, rickety step, hobbling over bare hills, limping in blind procession, clinging one to the next in single file. Humped backs, bent heads, vicious leering faces.

  I shivered. The rain increased in intensity, hammering on the narrow window.

  I spotted a tiny ring set in one wall. I pulled it and a door opened onto a large apartment, some twenty yards in length. Through a long window set halfway along one wall I saw, with a lifting heart, fireworks exploding over the Rialto Bridge. Their bursts of light fitfully illuminated the shadowy room.

  We advanced cautiously into the apartment. All was quiet except for Ralph's ragged breathing, the heavy tock of a clock and, of course, the squeak of rubber on rubber. Ralph was weakening, leaning more heavily on my arm. We reached a small stage, with heavy tasselled drapes closed around it. A puppet theater. There was a large, glass-fronted cupboard to the left of the stage. In the bursts of colored light from the fireworks outside we could see that it contained puppets, each some four feet in height.

  They were the stock characters from the covnmedia dell ante, in ancient, tattered garments: the pirate, the blackamoor, the sultan, the Chinaman, the serving man, the rich lord, the fair maiden, the brave chevalier, the doctor. They were suspended by their strings over a long rail. They hung limply, sagging at the knees.

  The eyes in the shiny, grotesquely painted faces were white balls with black staring pupils, their lower jaws hung open in slack grins. In the irregular light, the puppets seemed to be swaying, very slightly. Two, I noticed were not on the rail. At one side of the cabinet Lucifer stood, horned and black cloaked. At the other side, in shadow, stood a punchinello with a long bulbous stick.

  I peered at the punchinello, my heart thumping, half expecting the eyes to swivel and peer back at me. There was no movement. I looked round the room. The shadows pressed in on us.

  I freed myself from Ralph and stepped over to the stage. I reached out to open the curtains. The fireworks had been diminishing in inten
sity for the past minute or two. Now, abruptly, with a final fitful flicker, they stopped altogether. We were plunged into darkness. I heard Faye's sharp intake of breath. I paused, my arms outstretched, my fingers touching the heavy drapes.

  A sliver of light shot across the floor of the room. I looked back to the door we had come through from the last hexagonal room. It was ajar. I could glimpse the hunched punchinellos in procession over the pale hills.

  Something brushed my left hand. I jerked back to face the curtains. A white shape loomed between them. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I could make out, through the dim motes of light from the window, the hooked nose and the horrible, frozen leer of a punchinello.

  "Evening all," Williamson said.

  I fell back involuntarily. Faye gasped. Williamson pushed open the curtains and hopped to the floor, his club swinging in his left hand. He looked Ralph up and down.

  "Bit O. T. T., isn't it?" he said. "But then you always were a bit of a poser."

  "Hello, Reggie. Can't say I'm mad about the hat."

  Williamson lifted the club.

  "This is rather more titillating though, don't you think?"

  Ralph was still leaning on Faye's arm. I saw her clutch him more tightly.

  "Game over, I think, Reggie."

  He looked at me.

  "Lord Williamson to you, you oik. And I assure you, my game is far from over."

  "You're going to kill all three of us? I don't think so."

  I said this with more confidence than I felt.

  "Nor I. Why would I wish to? Did you know, Madrid, that the Venetian secret police used daggers made of glass for their assassinations? When inserted into a victim's body the glass point would snap off and leave virtually no trace of the fatal wound." Williamson waggled the club. "If I were to do what you suggest I would have to be less discreet."

  "Not sure you'd want my blood splashing around, Reggie," Ralph said. "In the circs."

  "Why don't we go downstairs and talk about this?" I said, rather optimistically I admit.

  "No, no, we're fine here," Williamson said. "I need to think for a moment. No offence Ralph, but I was hoping never to see you again. As long as you were out of the way, my little secret was safe."