The Murder Of Gonzago

11

The weather was damp, the air filled with the reek of rotting leaves. Basil Hunter couldn’t say he was enjoying his desolate ramble, but he had been quite unable to stand the familiar atmosphere of solid, unchanging monotony that reigned in his house. He had found it difficult to breathe.

At one point the sight of Louise reclining in the window seat, looking like a bloated Buddha, or Jabba the Hutt, breathing like a suction pump, gazing at him yearningly, had caused his intense annoyance to mount into furious rage. He had decided to go out, to prevent a conflagration.

Things seemed the same, yet they would never be the same. In a peculiar way Lord Remnant’s violent death had triggered something in his mind, something he had never suspected was there…

He discovered he was walking in the direction of Remnant Regis and soon enough he saw the castle rising in the mist, not unlike some crouching primeval monster with spikes on its back – that was what the chimneys made it look like.

Set in a kind of valley, next to a grey-watered artificial lake, Remnant Castle was surrounded by oaks, beeches and chestnuts of great size and strange growth. Long untrimmed branches dangled to the ground and creaked whenever the wind blew. There was a park on the other side, but it was invisible from where he stood. The lake was enshrouded in mists in most seasons, diaphanous and delicate in summer, thick and blighting in winter.

He raised his binoculars to his eyes. Somebody was turning on the lights at Remnant. How was Clarissa coping? When he had spoken to her at the crematorium, he had offered his services. She had allowed him to hold her hand in his for at least half a minute. He would have held it longer, but Louise had been hovering in the background, making impatient noises, sighing heavily, damn her. Clarissa had thanked him and said she would call him if she needed anything. She had sounded as though she meant it. She had looked him straight in the eye.

He wanted to see her. He longed to hear her voice. He could walk up to her front door and present himself. No, not yet. He shouldn’t act on an impulse. He was not the sort of man who took foolish and unnecessary risks – with one notable exception…

The Hunters lived at Clarenden Farm, set among acres and acres of land less than a quarter of a mile from Remnant Castle. They had been neighbours of the Remnants for quite a bit, though he’d never imagined they’d become anything like friends. He had been surprised when Clarissa had asked them for drinks, then to dinner, then to tea, then for drinks again; and had finally issued the invitation for a visit to their very own island.

Why had they been invited? They were not exactly Clarissa’s sort of people. Not as some kind of camouflage for Clarissa’s affair with the doctor, surely? That was what Louise had suggested. Louise was a nasty cat. He never ceased to marvel at the fascinating depths of his wife’s inexhaustible banality. Louise had gone out of her way to poison his mind against Clarissa. Louise was jealous. Terribly jealous. Well, there was nothing he could do about it.

Would things be different now that Lord Remnant was dead? Perhaps Clarissa would phone and ask him over for a drink. She owed him a lot. That was what she had told him the night Lord Remnant died.

What a night it had been…

The air had seemed full of electricity. They had stood about and stared… It was he and Sylvester-Sale who had eventually carried the body up the stairs – not to the master bedroom, Clarissa had said, but to Lord Remnant’s dressing room next door. They had laid the body on some kind of couch.

He had watched Dr Sylvester-Sale take off Lord Remnant’s cardboard nose, then his wig and the Gonzago beard. Lord Remnant’s eyes had been darkened with kohl – his cheeks covered in rouge – his mouth painted with purplish lipstick. The whole episode had had a nightmarish quality about it. They had kept the velvet cushion from the chaise longue downstairs under Lord Remnant’s head. The cushion had been damp with blood.

They had moved the body from the murder scene. They hadn’t called the police. It seemed that different rules operated at La Sorcière. Clarissa’s rules. Clarissa had taken charge of the situation.

He saw himself once more standing inside Lord Remnant’s dressing room. Each detail remained seared on his mind. The couch was upholstered in dark brown leather. There was a door on the right leading to the bedroom and another, a green baize door, to the en-suite bathroom on the left. A picture hung on the wall above the couch, an Edwardian painting entitled Cheating at Cards. It showed four men in full evening dress sitting stiffly around a table, one of them pulling a card sneakily out of his pocket.

Underneath the picture, pushed against the wall, stood a washstand of the greatest elaboration, dating back to the 1890s, or so he imagined; a freak of fancy, really, decorated with silverwork and a series of rhomboid-shaped painted panels. In the centre of it, forming the climax of the design, there was a prominent, highly ornamental copper tap.

As he stood looking down at Lord Remnant’s body, he had heard a sound. A laugh. A high-pitched giggle. He was sure he hadn’t imagined it. It had given him – well, quite a jolt, really. He had caught his breath. His hair had stood on end. Sylvester-Sale had been there, beside the door, on his way out, but he said he had heard nothing.

In a moment of weakness Basil had told Louise about it. He shouldn’t have. Louise had started speculating, wondering, propounding absurd theories… How could he ever have married her!

Basil Hunter stood still in his tracks and frowned. Though the window had been open, he didn’t think the sound had come from outside. He didn’t believe it had been made by a bird or an animal. It had been a human sound. Someone had laughed. Had there been someone hiding in the bathroom? But who? Who could it have been? Everybody had been downstairs – hadn’t they?