R. Raichev - The Murder Of Gonzago

‘She may have been praying. Isn’t that possible? For Roderick’s soul and so on? Asking God to spare Roderick and not despatch him to hell? She may be a Catholic, you know. There was a time when no Remnant would touch a Catholic with a bargepole, but things have changed. We know nothing about Clarissa. Nothing at all.’

‘It didn’t sound like a prayer.’ Renée shook her head. ‘It sounded as though – as though she was arguing with someone.’

‘She couldn’t have been arguing with my brother because he was dead. Well, people living in the Balkans and suchlike countries tend to talk to their dead as they lie in the coffin. Part of a long-standing tradition, I imagine. I think it’s called “lamentations”, but lamenting is hardly what one would expect of Clarissa, is it?’

‘Hardly.’

‘Clarissa loathed my brother – or so Felicity says. Felicity insists Clarissa had lots of lovers… Did you say you thought Clarissa was arguing with someone? You didn’t hear anyone answer her, did you?’

‘No. I didn’t dare go too near the door. I didn’t stop for long. I was terribly nervous.’

‘She may have been talking to herself. In my opinion Clarissa’s gone mad. Getting rid of all the servants, staying at Remnant all by herself and so on.’

‘I can’t help feeling that there is some unknown factor at work…’

‘Perhaps my brother’s death is destined to go down the centuries as one of those unsolved mysteries – unless Payne and his detective-story-writing wife manage to crack it somehow, though that seems most unlikely. It is only in books that the zeal of amateurs is rewarded by success. I do believe, my dear, my next novel will be a whodunnit.’

‘I thought you hated whodunnits.’

‘Not any longer. I have every intention of experimenting with the form. Genre conventions could be subverted while still being decorously observed.’ Gerard spoke dreamily. ‘A mysterious death in an exotic locale. A murder committed during an amateur theatrical production. A small circle of suspects-’

‘You intend to write an autobiographical whodunnit?’

‘I don’t see why novels shouldn’t be rooted in experience. Not such a bad idea if a character’s emotional concerns are in fact the author’s emotional concerns, even if I do take exception to the concept of uninhibited autobiography. What I am drawn to is the novelist’s freedom to blend, to compress, to conflate, to reframe. There’s a phrase that sums it up awfully well. What was it? Transformative power. Being able to take things that were terribly puzzling and make them lucid, producing an entertainment out of what was horrifying and disturbing. Now that would be a whacking big achievement. Wouldn’t you say?’

‘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?’

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.