R. Raichev - The Murder Of Gonzago

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"Very clever. I really am a fan." – R L Stine
Lord Remnant's eccentric parties on his privately owned Caribbean island of Grenadin are the stuff of legends… but then the 12th Earl suddenly dies in the course of an amateur production of The Murder of Gonzago, the play within a play in Hamlet. The Times obituary gives the cause of death as "heart attack." However, an anonymous video tape showing Lord Remnant's final moments makes it clear that the nobleman's demise was far from natural.
As it happens so often, Antonia and Hugh Payne get involved in the sinister events surrounding Lord Remnant's death entirely by accident. They are intrigued by the boldness of the murder, which seems to have been committed within a full view of Lord Remnant's wife Clarissa and their four guests. Who killed Lord Remnant? Was it his drug-addicted stepson Stephan? Was it Clarissa's Aunt Hortense, whose past contains a dark and shocking secret? Was it, as Stephan claims, the demonic "Grimaud"? Or perhaps it is the elusive Mr. Quin, who is left a vast amount of money in Lord Remnant's will, for no apparent reason.

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‘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.

35

The Clue of the Coiled Cobra

The walls and ceiling of the library at Remnant were painted with classical figures in colours that had succumbed to the draining power of the sun and were now faded to pastel. The Louis XIII chairs were upholstered in mauve velvet, which, Gerard Fenwick had pointed out with a slight grimace, was one of Clarissa’s legacies. The faience lions either side of the Gothic fireplace had once belonged to Catherine the Great. A lot of the books bore the coat of arms of Henry VIII or Elizabeth I. There were books printed on papier vélin pur fil Lafuma .

‘She recognized him at dinner that night as he started recounting his unsavoury escapades from the mid-sixties,’ Major Payne was explaining. ‘He boasted of deflowering debutantes and of stealing their jewellery and keeping trophies. He then said that all the jewels his wife was wearing at that very moment had belonged to his victims.’

‘And then Hortense got her second and much greater shock, which probably unhinged her and led her to do what she did,’ said Antonia. ‘Lord Remnant had pointed to the bracelet Clarissa was wearing. Hortense recognized it instantly. It had belonged to her once. It was fashioned like a coiled cobra and was known as the Keppel Clasp.’

It was three weeks later and they were sitting in the library at Remnant Castle.

Gerard Fenwick, thirteenth Earl Remnant, looked up from the notes he had been making. ‘She put two and two together? The truth came to her in a flash? This is awfully good. Awfully good.’ He wore country tweeds, twills, fawn suede shoes and a red-and-white neck-square tied at a jaunty angle. He looked relaxed and happy. One wouldn’t have thought that that very morning his solicitors had warned him the divorce he was contemplating might turn out to be protracted, expensive and, very possibly, acrimonious.

Payne drew a forefinger across his jaw. ‘There was only one Keppel Clasp. Hortense told us it was quite unique. She also admitted it had been stolen from her. So we knew that there couldn’t be any mistake.’

‘You had your Eureka moment.’ Gerard nodded. ‘That sudden, exultant sense of revelation, when the detective sees with absolute certainty the answer to the puzzle. I’ve been wondering about it. The image is quite striking, you know.’

‘What image?’

‘The multicoloured pieces of a spherical puzzle whirling wildly, round and round, and then, piece by piece, clicking together into a perfect globe… Is that how it happens?’

‘More or less,’ Antonia said. It wasn’t quite like that, but why disappoint him?

‘How terribly exciting. I do disapprove of murder, mind, but this is terribly exciting. How did you work things out exactly?’

‘Well, we saw a photograph of Hortense wearing the bracelet. Hugh then remembered spotting that same bracelet on Clarissa’s wrist in the Gonzago video. And then Louise Hunter told me what Lord Remnant had said at dinner – and she confirmed that Clarissa had been wearing the Keppel Clasp. She also said Hortense had looked extremely shocked – sick as a parrot.’

‘There was a book I read as a boy. Cannot remember what it was about, but it had a bloody marvellous title. The Clue of the Coiled Cobra .’ Gerard Fenwick glanced at the high Gothic bookshelves surmounted by niches containing the busts of Homer, Horace and other ancient men of letters. ‘By someone called Bruce Campbell… There it is – I think that’s the one – between Bonjour Tristesse and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy . It shouldn’t be there at all.’

‘You haven’t been trying to arrange the books thematically, have you?’ Payne asked.

‘No, of course not. Wouldn’t dream of it. Tradewell has. A damned silly thing to do, but then Tradewell hasn’t been himself. I’ve been humouring him.’

As though on cue, the door opened and Tradewell brought them coffee. The Remnant butler’s expression was lugubrious. His eyes were bloodshot and his lower lip trembled. He wore black. His master – his real master this time – had been cremated only a couple of days earlier. At the funeral Tradewell had created something of a stir by falling on his knees and praying with his hands clasped above his head.

Antonia was intrigued by the coffee cups – round in shape, made of thin eighteenth-century china and decorated with blue and gold phoenixes floating up from the fires beneath them.

Needless to say, the coffee was excellent.

‘Such things happen in bad dreams, from which one awakens in panic and terror,’ Payne went on. ‘At dinner that night Hortense found herself sitting opposite the man who had raped her forty-five years before, who had made her pregnant and – as though that were not enough – who, by a terrible trick of fate, had married her daughter.’

‘Who was also his daughter,’ said Antonia.

‘My brother married his own daughter,’ Gerard said meditatively. ‘Well, that’s the kind of thing Roderick would do. He was always a most peculiar fellow.’

‘Hortense told us that it was her brother-in-law who fathered Clarissa,’ Antonia said. ‘That was a lie.’

‘Clarissa is in the rather curious position of being an earl’s daughter and an earl’s relict,’ said Payne. ‘So she could be addressed as Lady Clarissa – as well as Lady Remnant.’

‘You are absolutely right, Payne. How funny. D’you think someone should give the Debrett’ s people a tinkle?’

‘We believe the shock proved too great for Hortense.’ Antonia took a sip of coffee. ‘While we were waiting for the police, she told us what she felt. Horror – revulsion – outrage – an overpowering desire for revenge. She experienced a great sense of urgency , she said. Her daughter’s marriage. It was all wrong. Really wrong. It mustn’t be allowed to continue.’

‘Earlier that same day Hortense had seen Lord Remnant put the silencer on the gun,’ said Payne. ‘She knew he kept the gun in his desk. The moment she realized who he was, she left the dinner table, went up to his study and took the gun. The best time to kill him, she decided, was during the dumbshow. She admitted she had no misgivings about framing Stephan. She knew Clarissa would never allow the police to get involved. Clarissa believed Stephan had killed Quin, mistaking him for his stepfather.’

‘But it was Hortense who made that mistake,’ said Antonia.

‘We believe Lord Remnant guessed that Hortense was planning to kill him. He saw the look on her face at dinner. The shock and the dismay and the pure horror. He watched her dash out of the room like a bat out of hell. Later he discovered his gun had disappeared from his desk.’

‘He didn’t realize who she was?’

‘No, Fenwick, he didn’t. He never recognized her. He simply assumed she hated him because he had made her feel a fool. He thought her a mad old woman. He was not in the least perturbed. Well, your brother enjoyed playing games with people. He had a penchant for psychological experiments-’

‘He decided to turn Hortense’s hatred of him to his own advantage,’ said Antonia.

‘Let me get this thing clear. My brother had been planning to kill Peter Quin, but now he decided to step back and let her do his dirty work for him?’

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