R Raichev - The Death of Corinne

‘Le falcon and Ruse… Look at that brooch! It’s magnificent, isn’t it? I gave it to her.’ Lady Grylls tapped a page. ‘Cost me a pretty penny. Cartier’s… There’s me with le falcon at the Cafe de Paris. Look at my dress – studded with diamonds – see how it glitters? My figure wasn’t really bad then. If I wore something like that nowadays, I’d look like a spray-flecked seal… The way the falcon’s eyeing me!’ Suddenly Lady Grylls became serious. ‘Wasn’t that what you were looking for, Antonia? I did give myself away, didn’t I? Well, this is not the only picture of us together. There are others. There’s one of him kissing me on the steps of the Savoy.’ She started leafing through the scrapbook. ‘It’s somewhere – I don’t think I’ve thrown anything away.’

There was a stunned pause. ‘You don’t mean you and him…’ Major Payne began.

‘I do mean me and him, Hughie. Le falcon and I saw quite a bit of each other – both before and after he’d got engaged to Ruse. There was quite a thing between us. I’d always wanted to know why Linda fell for Fabrice, you see. I mean The Pursuit of Love. Or Lady Donna for the Frenchman in the creek. Goodness. My head was full of that kind of romantic bosh… Don’t stare like that. It was all a long time ago. Francois-Enrique was double-crossing Ruse with me. I can’t say I am sorry. In a way I was glad… Wasn’t that what you wanted to find out, Antonia?’ A defiant note had crept into Lady Grylls’s voice.

‘No. It was – it was something else,’ Antonia faltered.

‘Are you sure? You are a dangerous woman.’

‘Not at all -

‘Well, I might as well tell you the whole story. I was in love with the falcon. No. I was mad about him. I’ve never loved anyone as much as I loved him. The way he looked at me! Ah. I’d got it into my head that I was on my way to becoming a dowdy back number, you see, but he made me feel – goodness, I can’t explain – as though he were inspecting one of those jewellers’ trays on which famous diamonds are displayed! I’d have done anything for him. If he’d told me, here’s a gun, go and shoot the Prime Minister, I’d have gone and done it. I honestly would have. Mr Attlee would have been a dead man. So would Mr Churchill.’ Lady Grylls sounded disturbingly earnest. ‘So, for that matter, would Mr Eden -’

‘Darling – not three prime ministers. It lasted that long?’

‘Well, our affair started while he was courting Ruse. And we continued seeing each other after he and Ruse got married and went to Paris. Rory hadn’t an inkling… Such a fool!’ She guffawed. ‘Le falcon came to London often, on business trips. I lived for those visits. I paid a price of course… The usual… I don’t know why I am telling you any of this. None of your bloody business.’

‘You don’t mean you got…’

‘Preggers? I did, Hughie.’

‘Corinne is your -’

‘Don’t be absurd, Antonia.’

‘Not Cousin Patricia?’

‘Well spotted, Hughie. My daughter Patricia. My first-born child was his. I fear so – yes. She’s got his eyes – yellow grey. And his fatal passion for gambling, sadly.’

‘Did Rosamund know?’

‘She didn’t know about Patricia, I don’t think, but if you mean about her husband having an affair with me, yes. Ruse saw a photograph of us in the Tatler. She saw the look on Francois-Enrique’s face. Then she asked me point blank and I confessed… I don’t think she quite minded.’ Lady Grylls scowled. ‘You see, she knew that he would never leave her. She knew her power. She was so damnably cocky about it. I did hate her for it. Oh well. It’s all in the past now… Goodness, I do feel light-headed. I’ll go and have a lie-down. Do excuse me.’

The door slammed shut behind her. There was a pause. Payne looked at his wife. ‘Well! What do you think of that?’

Antonia shrugged. ‘As she said, it’s none of our bloody business.’

There was another pause. Payne pointed to the scrapbook. ‘You don’t think Ruse and Francois-Enrique really died, do you?’

‘It’s just an idea… In the months leading up to their tragic death, Francois-Enrique had been under investigation for stealing half a million from his clients. A very, very large sum of money in 1960 -’

‘They had been mangled by wild beasts. Unrecognizable, that’s what it said in the paper, didn’t it?’ Payne paused. ‘The bodies were identified by his mother. She went to Kenya. She then decided to have them buried there. Soon after she opened her own clinic, I remember Aunt Nellie telling me. It costs a pretty penny to open a clinic. Aunt Nellie thinks Madame Coreille got some kind of inheritance – but what if there wasn’t an inheritance? The money could have been -’

‘Madame Coreille’s reward for her cooperation. Exactly. It all fits in. There was the falcon and Ruse’s fatal love of gambling. They had been losing a lot of money. They ignored warnings about dangerous gangs. They didn’t take a local guide with them. A Dutch couple had disappeared in the area a while earlier. Is it too far-fetched to suppose that the falcon and Ruse -’

‘- staged their own death? No, not too far-fetched at all.’

‘Oh God, we do finish each other’s sentences, Hugh. Did you notice?’

‘We do it only when propounding theories. Now don’t interrupt… The falcon and Ruse were both wrong ’uns. They could have struck up some sort of deal with one of those criminal gangs,‘ Major Payne went on. ’The poor Dutch couple might have been kept captive by the gang, pending a ransom or something – it might have been them who got killed and substituted for the Coreilles… As you say, my love, it is certainly an idea. It’s not as though that kind of thing has never happened. People do steal fortunes, fake their deaths, assume new identities and disappear to paradise islands. Only,‘ Major Payne said, ’I don’t quite see how any of this could have any bearing on the death threats received by the Coreilles’ daughter forty-three years later

… Do you?’

‘No, I don’t… Changing the subject,’ Antonia said, ‘what do you think Jonson told Peverel to make him look uncomfortable?’

The Haunting

It was early the following day, 2nd April.

Antonia sat in bed writing her diary, a blanket around her shoulders. Her bedside table lamp was on. It was five thirty in the morning and too early to expect tea. The heating had not come on either.

Antonia was dying for a cup of tea. She wished she had accepted Lady Grylls’s offer of an ancient Teasmade. It would have been so nice to have it hissing and spluttering on the bedside table. Beside her Hugh hadn’t stirred… Should she sneak down to the kitchen in her dressing gown and brew herself a pot of tea? No. Too cold. The wind was in the east. She could hear it roaming about the house like a ranging animal, thrusting its paws into the crannies and holes that had been formed as a result of the late Lord Grylls’s reluctance to repair and modernize Chalfont, sniffing under lintels, whining hoarsely the while. Antonia shivered and pulled the blanket round her shoulders. She remembered what Noel Coward had written in his diary after a weekend visit at Chalfont in the mid-1930s: Woke frozen. Shaving sheer agony. Loo like an ice-box. Breakfast a bore.

She concentrated on her diary.

Corinne Coreille is not quite real. (Antonia wrote.) Her perpetual, unchanging youth for one puzzles me. We have been given so much information, some silly, some downright bizarre, all of it fascinating, and yet, like Aunt Nellie, I feel I know nothing about her. What is she like as a person? Really like. Has she got a personality at all, like us, ordinary mortals? She must have and yet I keep thinking of her as belonging to an alien species, as of some fabulous monster, an ageless phantom embalmed in her all-devouring myth.