The Murder Of Gonzago

34

‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’

‘That looks like one of the guns from the gun room. You shouldn’t mess around with guns, you know. Highly dangerous. What if it’s loaded?’

‘It is loaded. The ammunition was in the desk. You don’t seem to change your habits. You never lock anything up. Same as at La Sorcière.’

‘You made a big mistake at La Sorcière. You risk making another mistake now.’

‘Let me be the judge of that.’

‘You should get a new pair of glasses, perhaps?’

‘I hate you,’ she said.

‘Those one hates live for ever.’

‘So you don’t know who I am?’

‘You are my Anima. That’s a psychological term denoting the denied female element of the male psyche. Denied but desired.’ Lord Remnant picked up his glass. ‘Of course I know who you are, you old fool. You are Miss Baedeker. You are Clarissa’s dotty old aunt.’

‘I am five years younger than you.’

‘I’d never have thought it possible.’ He shook his head. ‘Well, men age differently from women. May I suggest you leave my room at once? In the next hour or so I shall be frightfully busy. I don’t want to be discourteous, but I’ve got things to do. Unfinished business, you may say. It’s all rather delicate. Not for your tender ears. It may shock you. You’d probably say I had a genius for defilement.’

Hortense Tilling didn’t lower the gun. Her eyes behind the glasses looked at him steadily. ‘I thought you guessed that night. I thought you recognized me.’

‘Go away, Aunt Hortense.’ He waved his hands. ‘Shoo!’ Definitely a few stamps short of the first-class rate, he thought. Wouldn’t be able to tell a hawk from a handsaw, if one accepted that feat as an adequate criterion of sanity.

‘Look at me.’ She took off her glasses. There were tears in her eyes. ‘We met – years ago.’

‘No day is so dead as the day before yesterday,’ he said.

‘We met at the party at the Bruce-Daltons’. On the fifth of June.’

‘As a matter of fact, I used to know some people called Bruce-Dalton. I wonder if they are the same Bruce-Daltons. Do you mean we met at the Bruce-Daltons’? My memory is not what it used to be. Place in Blenheim Mews?’

‘Yes. You and I were at the party. I had no idea who you were. Who you really were. I believe you were wearing disguise. You pretended to be a foreigner. You introduced yourself as a Frenchman called Pierre La Russe.’

He took a gulp of malt. ‘One of my sobriquets, I imagine. Long time ago. No recollection of it at all. I’ll have to take your word for it.’

‘You asked me to dance. Then you brought me a drink. I don’t think I really liked you, but you were very persistent. I couldn’t shake you off. Then something happened. The room and everybody in it went fuzzy. Then I found I was in a cab with you.’

‘That seems to ring a bell, but only because that was the sort of thing that happened quite often at one time… You were a deb?’

‘I remember nothing after the cab. You spiked my drink, didn’t you?’

He shrugged. ‘I might have done. What if I did? It was the kind of thing I did every now and then. It doesn’t kill, you know. Just makes you soft and pliant. You must have been quite pretty. Pretty but obdurate. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise.’

‘You took me somewhere. I remember nothing. Nothing at all. I woke up late in the morning, feeling dreadful.’

‘Dreadful? Really? I believe it was jolly powerful stuff. Or maybe I overdosed you. Can’t remember the technical name now. Aide d’amour, that’s what I called it,’ Lord Remnant said thoughtfully. ‘Cost me a pretty penny, I think. I didn’t have that much money in those days, you know.’

‘Bastard,’ she said.

‘Hard to come by stuff like that in the sixties. No internet shopping in those days. No websites offering naughty meds. Why, in the name of Beelzebub, are you looking at me like that? So what if we spent a night together? We were young and impulsive. Must you make a song and dance about it?’

‘You stole my bracelet.’

‘Well, that’s the kind of thing I did. The action of a cad, I agree.’ He was getting impatient.

‘None of it was my fault,’ Hortense said, ‘but I have lived with a sense of guilt ever since. I have been blaming myself. The shame never left me.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t start expounding the complications of your psyche just now. I can’t help you, you know. I am no specialist. Have you considered going into therapy? Find yourself a good shrink? You may discover it is all a false memory.’

‘Monster,’ she said. ‘Beast.’

‘Get thee to a nunnery… How about religion? Why don’t you try religion?’

‘You deserve to die.’

‘You seem determined to utterly crush the optimistic streak in my nature.’ He gave a sigh.

‘You ruined my life. You ruined my daughter’s life.’

‘Don’t be so damned melodramatic. I don’t know your daughter.’

‘You don’t know what happened, do you?’ She spoke in a choked voice.

‘I must admit to being thoroughly fogged. It was all a long time ago. No day is so dead as the day before yesterday, I keep telling you.’ His eyes were on the gun in her hand.

‘I got pregnant,’ she said. ‘Nine months later I gave birth to a baby girl.’

‘Really? You mean I had a child?’

‘You have a child.’

‘It is alive? You didn’t have an abortion?’

‘No.’

‘Stupid and irresponsible.’ He shook his head. ‘Such compulsive urges to replicate are usually associated with cancer cells.’

‘I couldn’t bring myself to have an abortion. I was confused – frightened – I was at my wits’ end – I cried a lot – I felt great affection for my unborn child – I discovered I had a strong maternal instinct-’

‘I hate haranguing, Aunt Hortense, I really do, but self-analysis can actually cause an awful lot of damage to the psyche. I know Freud did it, but he had the advantage of, well, of being Freud.’ Lord Remnant wondered if he could disarm her if he pounced on her. He wasn’t as agile as he once was. ‘So we have a child? That’s a cause for celebration, don’t you think?’

‘No, it is not.’ Tears were rolling down her face. ‘It is not.’

‘Oh? Why not?’ The old fool wouldn’t dare pull the trigger, would she? On the other hand, she might. He reminded himself that she’d done it once already. If only he could get a little bit closer, he would have no problem disarming her. He could cosh her with the bottle, he supposed. Or blind her by splashing malt in her eyes. Stupid old fool.

‘How about a drinkie? Do you good. Give you a cosy feeling. No? I need to replenish my glass-’ He reached out for the bottle of malt.

‘Don’t move.’

‘No? It’s time for you to throw in the towel, don’t you think?’

‘Don’t move.’ She raised the gun. Heavens, she was aiming at his forehead!

He sighed again. ‘If you only knew how ridiculous you look. A woman at your time of life should be in her garden, snipping off the heads of defunct roses, or sitting in her boudoir, making intricately shaped tea-cosies.’

Actually she presented a damned unnerving sight with her complexion the colour of weak lemonade and those round glasses gleaming in the morning light.

‘The baby was born on the third of March 1965. It was a girl.’

‘Does the exact date matter?’

‘It does. The third of March 1965.’

‘Actually, that rings a bell,’ he said after a pause. ‘Now why is that?’

‘I gave her the name Clarissa.’

‘Oh yes. That’s Clarissa’s birthday. Of course. Third of March 1965. Actually, I met Clarissa at the Bruce-Daltons’. How things come back to one. That was three and a half years ago. Clarissa is the daughter of the Vuillaumys.’

‘No, she isn’t. They didn’t have any children. They adopted Clarissa.’

He stared at her. There was a pause. He put down his glass. ‘What are you trying to say, you old witch? What are you insinuating?’

‘Clarissa is our daughter. You married your own daughter.’

It took him a moment to recover his poise. ‘So what if I did? That kind of thing does happen. More often than one imagines, I am sure. The way you go on, one might be excused for thinking I’d strangled a whole litter of newborn babies or – or gone to a funeral, propped up the corpse in its coffin and performed a ventriloquist act. What was it the wag said? Vice is nice but incest is best-’ He broke off, amazed at his audacity. ‘Too late to make amends, anyhow.’

‘It is too late, yes,’ she said.

‘I suggest you keep your mouth zipped up, Miss Baedeker. Better, put a muzzle on it. You don’t want the world to know I married my daughter, do you? There’s the family name to consider and so on. I don’t want to give my sister-in-law the chance to indulge in schadenfreude. Still, Clarissa is my wife and, as it happens, I have started finding her madly attractive. In fact, I am going to her now-’

‘No, you are not.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘You are not.’

‘Keep out of my way, you old loon-’

‘Stay where you are.’

Suddenly Lord Remnant was possessed by a fury so intense that for a few seconds it paralysed speech and even thought. It swept through his body like a wave of physical nausea, leaving him white and shaking. No one ever opposed him! No one ever told him where to stay! He flared up.

‘How dare you hold me up? Who do you think you are? Give me the gun at once or I’ll break your bloody neck-’

As he took a step towards her, she pulled the trigger.

The bullet hit him between the eyes.

For a moment he stood extremely still, a surprised expression on his face, then he fell to the floor.

The next moment the door burst open and Antonia and Major Payne entered the room.

‘This time I got the right one,’ Hortense Tilling said.