The Murder Of Gonzago

10

The phone rang and Clarissa’s heart jumped inside her. She wanted to answer it because she thought it might be Syl, whom she loved with a love that was passionate, single-minded and overpowering, but she also feared it might be the call she dreaded. When she eventually did pick up the receiver, she discovered it was somebody from the Sunday Telegraph.

A journalist. A man. He said they wanted to do a feature on Remnant Castle – would Lady Remnant be good enough to show them around and give them an interview? The feature would appear in the Telegraph magazine. It was a friendly enough voice.

Clarissa said no, impossible, out of the question; her husband had been dead only ten days, they must know that, surely? Couldn’t they be more sensitive? Her husband’s ashes were still warm in the urn, she was terribly upset, she was ill, she had been sleeping badly, everything was at sixes and sevens, she was receiving no one, couldn’t they leave her alone?

‘Perhaps you could call again when my brother-in-law takes over. You may find him more welcoming. He may even suggest writing the piece himself!’ She slammed down the receiver.

Her brother-in-law had hinted he might sell the place. She was not at all surprised. That was what she had always wanted to do herself. Gerard needed the money for some crackpot idea of his. Another futile writing venture, she imagined.

The day was cold and grey. She felt oppressed by the mists that invariably rose around Remnant. She felt cut off, isolated. The central heating wasn’t working properly and there was no one who could do anything about it. She had got rid of the servants – she had followed the instructions to the letter. No servants and no visitors.

Her eyelids fluttered – closed.

She dozed off.

She had a dream.

They were back at La Sorcière and her husband lay on the chaise longue and he was bleeding profusely from a wound in the back of his head. There was blood everywhere, on the floor, on the walls, even on the ceiling, the whole room glistened with it. Then the french windows burst open and someone dressed in white and wearing the Bottom head sauntered in, calling out breezily, ‘Anyone for tennis?’ A man. Only instead of a tennis racquet, he held a gun – and his voice was very much like her husband’s voice-

She woke up.

She rose to her feet. She felt sick. She couldn’t bear sitting another moment in the barn-like drawing room with its crimson-clad walls, hung in 1895 and now faded to a shade of raspberry fool, huge crystal chandeliers that brought to mind inverted fountains, Ming vases, Remnant portraits painted by the likes of Gainsborough, Reynolds, de Lázló, Sargent and Lucian Freud.

Mr Quin. She was expecting a call from Mr Quin. Mr Quin had her in his power. She needed to obey Mr Quin’s orders. She shut her eyes. I pray and hope I die before I go mad, she thought.

It was only midday, but it was getting darker by the minute. Twilight at noon. How she hated England! She longed to go back to the Caribbean. That morning she had woken up filled with the depressing foreknowledge that it would be another day of unmitigated misery…

She intended to turn on every single chandelier and she was going to light all the candles. Her instructions hadn’t included having to keep Remnant sunk in gloom. Thank God for small mercies. She laughed shrilly and at once felt the ache in her throat that preceded tears.

As she walked across the drawing room and opened the door she tried to divide her thoughts into manageable portions and make sense of the events of the last ten days.

She might have been the abbess of a nunnery heading for a private audience with the Pope. Her face was free of make-up and her short fair hair was entirely concealed by a black chiffon scarf; her black dress was loose and long, though her slender ankles were clad in black silk and she wore vaguely erotic black high-heeled shoes.

She was also wearing enormous round black sunglasses, which was odd of her, she knew, one didn’t wear sunglasses indoors, especially not in England, but they dramatized her lightly bronzed face, which was an effect she rather liked. But her carefully cultivated Grenadin tan had started to fade and she needed to do something about it. The moment I stop caring how I look will be the absolute unconditional end, she thought. She paused to light a cigarette and dropped the match on the floor.

Not so long ago there had been an insolent air of authority about Clarissa, of confidence, of arrogance even, also of carelessness and insouciance; she had managed to display the negligent drop-dead chic with which a mannequin swishes down a catwalk.

No more. She was aware that she was walking rather stiffly, stagily, self-consciously; she might have had a bit part in some amateur production. She almost expected the director to shout and halt her and order her to start again, to walk away and do it again, properly…

Catching sight of her reflection in one of the murky mottled mirrors made her shudder. She took off her dark glasses. The Bride of Frankenstein, she mouthed. She had lost a lot of weight. She looked preternaturally ethereal; thinner than ever before! Beneath the fading tan she was as pale as an ivory opium pipe. Well, she had hardly eaten a thing for heaven knew how long. She had been subsisting on the odd bowl of soup and cups of strong Arabica roast, which, she suspected, accounted for the panic attacks she had been having.

Syl had said once she looked a bit like Marilyn Monroe. She was miming ‘I Wanna Be Loved By You’, in front of the mirror. She put the dark glasses back on.

She had been taking a range of drugs, including lithium and Sarafem, for her anxiety and depression. What she really felt like doing was smoking a reefer, but at the thought of Stephan feeling suicidal at Sans Souci, she decided against it. No. No drugs.

‘I am the twelfth countess of this thousand-year-old place,’ she said aloud. For some reason the sound of her cracked voice made her feel marginally better. She went on speaking to an imaginary audience. ‘Remnant Castle contains fifty-eight rooms and eleven intricately carved staircases. It’s a classic example of opulent and gilded decay.’

The distance between the main dining room and the nearest kitchen was a hundred metres. The roof, on the other hand, covered an acre and not once in living memory had it been completely watertight. She could hear a dripping sound now from somewhere. The corridor walls were covered in satin and gold and hung with faded tapestries of mythical birds. She passed by ornate mirrors and perfectly pointless consoles, little couches and marble tables and a lot of pictures in gilded frames.

Remnant Castle had once been an Augustinian priory, consecrated in 937 and dedicated to some saint or other. It had become the property of her husband’s family at the Dissolution of Monasteries in the 1530s. The earliest part of the building dated from between the third and fifth centuries.

The daughter of minor gentry, she had been brought up in an elegant enough Georgian townhouse in Upton-upon-Severn, but it hadn’t exactly prepared her for the transplant to this monstrosity of a mansion, which spoke eloquently of times more spacious than the present and sported thirty-five chimneys on its roof.

She spoke again. ‘In one of the cellars there is a semicircular protuberance in the wall that cannot be accounted for by any ordinary architectural rule. Here, it is said, many years ago a blaspheming monk was walled up alive, and sometimes, in the depths of the night, his ghost can be heard moaning and tearing at the walls of his prison.’

What was that? Something scurried, slithered and squeaked inside the wainscoting. No, not the monk – rats? Were they trying to gnaw their way out? That would be the final straw – armies of rats rampaging at Remnant! She had seen a dead rat once in the corridor outside her bedroom, lying on its back, its pink paws disconcertingly bringing to mind the hands of a human child.

Clarissa suddenly recalled the time she had been pregnant with Stephan. How he had moved inside her – kicking – wriggling like a fish. She had felt an incomparable joy unlike anything she had known before – or since. Tears welled up in her eyes. My baby, she whispered. My baby, I miss you so.

She must tell Tradewell to set traps or call the exterminator, before it was too late. No, she couldn’t. She kept forgetting she had dispensed with her butler.

Clarissa had started walking fast – faster and faster – she nearly broke into a run. She forced herself to stop. She wondered if she was in a state of hypomania. Syl had warned her about it.

Passing by a bronze statue representing Actaeon set upon by hounds, she was filled with terrible pity. ‘You poor wretched thing, I know exactly how you feel,’ she murmured. She took out her mobile phone. It was on. Didn’t need recharging either.

He had said he would phone her. It wouldn’t do to miss his call. It would make him cross. She dreaded hearing his voice. Oh, how she dreaded it.

This is all a little bit too much, she thought. The truth is I can’t cope. I am scared. I am edging towards the abyss. I am on the verge of collapse. I have got myself involved in murder and deception of the most bizarre kind.