R.T. Raichev - Murder of Gonzago

‘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.

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 velin 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.