R Raichev - Murder at the Villa Byzantine

‘That is correct, yes. I don’t know what would have happened if I had, as you put it, “turned up”. I am hopeless in extreme situations, completely futile, I fear. I tend to lose my head. Sorry – that was an unfortunate way of putting it.’ Miss Hope lowered her voice. ‘She was beheaded, wasn’t she? I can’t imagine myself becoming the victim of senseless slaughter, but then, who can? Can you? What kind of monster would want to do a thing like that? Not a Mussulman, I trust? They’ve been getting such bad press. It couldn’t have been an honour killing, could it? As it happens, I am by no means a stranger to death-’

‘What exactly do you mean by that?’

‘I am eighty-four now, Inspector. Whatever opinions there may be to the contrary, I have reached the kind of age that has little to recommend it. Most of my dear friends and acquaintances have departed from this world and I am far from convinced they are in a better place. Death is still working like a mole – and digs my grave at each remove. The poet Herbert, you know. My second cousin, would you believe it, died earlier this year and she was three years younger than me. She seemed robust enough, but those, in my experience, are the very ones who go like a snap of the fingers.’

‘I see what you mean… Well, that will be all, Miss Hope.’

‘Don’t you want to know why I didn’t “turn up” at Mr Vane’s house on the day Stella was killed? Aren’t details in criminal cases considered to be crucial? I read somewhere that it is the details that bind everything together.’

‘That will be all, Miss Hope-’

‘This is what happened, Inspector. I was about to leave my house and was all ready to go when I got a phone call from my great niece – a dear girl, though not as predictable as I would have wished her to be – she lives in Richmond-on-Thames, did I say? Now, this is a somewhat delicate matter, Inspector, so I’d be grateful if-’

‘That’s all right, Miss Hope. You don’t need to tell me about your niece. That will be all,’ he said in a firm voice. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll need to bother you again, but if we do think of anything-’

‘You will not hesitate to give me a ring? Yes, quite. Please do. Only too happy to assist the Law. Well, goodbye, Inspector.’

‘Goodbye- Wait a minute.’

She laughed. ‘You’ve already thought of something?’

‘How did you know that Mrs Markoff had a gentleman friend in England?’

‘How did I know? Goodness. Didn’t I say?’

‘No.’

‘I am sure I did.’

‘You didn’t.’

‘Well, it was like this. Stella seemed really excited that day – the day she came to Mr Vane’s house – when the two of us met. She kept glancing at her hand, twiddling her fingers. She was wearing an engagement ring, I noticed at once. My eyesight, I am glad to report, remains excellent. I was presumptuous enough to comment on the ring’s delicate beauty and elegance. That’s when she told me. She blushed like a girl and said that she was engaged to be married and that her fiance was in fact English.’

‘I see.’

‘I gave her my sincerest congratulations – which, when you come to think of it, in the light of what took place, makes the whole thing so terribly tragic.’

For a couple of moments she remained very still, looking down at the mobile phone in her hand. That had been a close shave. Never underestimate the police. A very little thing of course, a minor slip-up, but Inspector Davidson was clearly someone who paid attention to seemingly irrelevant details. What would have happened if she had failed to think fast, ‘on her feet’, as they said? Well, she could have pretended to be muddled. Miss Hope was an old lady and one expected old ladies to get muddled. She didn’t think he would have started harbouring any serious suspicions about her, would he?

No. An old lady of eighty-four, brandishing a sword?

She laughed at the idea.

Of course it would be a different matter altogether if, for some reason, he got it into his head that she was not an old lady. She didn’t think the inspector would go back to Tancred and start asking him questions – whether Tancred happened to overhear Miss Hope’s conversation with Stella concerning Stella’s engagement ring, forthcoming nuptials, husband-to-be, and so on.

Well, no such conversation had ever taken place.

She had made it up.

I don’t exist, she thought. I am the phantom lady.

(She hadn’t overdone the twittering, had she?)

Devices and Desires

I did not kill my mother, Moon wrote, tears streaming down her face. Nobody seems to believe me, but I didn’t kill her. I didn’t like her, but I didn’t kill her. I guess I used to love her when I was a kid, when I was nine or ten and we lived in Bulgaria, but it all feels like a dream now. I remember her taking me mushroom-picking in the Vitosha mountain once. We saw a roe deer, which stood very still and stared back at us. My mother held me by the hand and whispered, ‘She’s going back to her child. Her child is waiting for her.’ I know it’s dumb, but thinking about the roe deer and her child and my hand in my mother’s hand makes me want to cry.

Tancred Vane sat in front of his computer, working on the historical background of the Prince Cyril biography.

The Bulgarian monarchy was a casualty of the rival totalitarianisms of Hitler and Stalin in the 1940s. The independent Bulgarian kingdom was a product of the balance-of-power diplomacy that characterized the period preceding World War I. The practice of despatching dashing German princes to fashion modern kingdoms out of backward Balkan lands was fanciful, arrogant, even absurd; the motivation was a typically nineteenth-century blend of faith, greed and intrigue.

He heard the front door bell ring. Miss Hope. Couldn’t be anyone else. He glanced at his watch. On time, as always. The feeling of vague unease returned. He remembered his dream. Stella Markoff trying to warn him – pointing to her wired lips Nonsense!

The front door bell rang again. He clicked on Save and rose.

The lodge, he reminded himself. He would have to tackle the matter of the lodge.

‘You, my dear boy, are devoted to your art to the exclusion of everything else. That can be quite dangerous,’ Miss Hope said. She was watching Tancred Vane as he wrote down something she had said earlier on. As usual they were sitting in his study, she in the window seat, he beside his desk.

‘Dangerous?’ Vane looked up with an abstracted smile. ‘Surely not? In what way dangerous?’

‘Well, you allow this biography to claim every ounce of your attention, not to mention your energy. In consequence, I fear, you may be missing out on some of the things that really matter in life.’

‘You don’t think the Prince Cyril biography matters?’

‘No. To be perfectly honest, I don’t. Why are you looking so very shocked? It’s in the Bible. Do not put your trust in princes. Ah, Tancredi, my Tancredi, perhaps one day I will write a story about you!’

‘What kind of story?’

‘It will be the kind of story that moves like a series of tapestries as it enacts the consequences of an artist’s strange encounter with his own being. It will be an extended metaphor for the separation, even estrangement, between the artist and the conventional world, and the artist’s sense of an inner glory and necessity, which can be shirked only at the expense of his true relationship to himself.’

‘What do you mean? Sorry – all this is a bit above my head.’

‘Do you think you know yourself? Tell me truthfully!’ Her eyes were fixed on him.

‘Do I know myself? Well, I think so, yes. Don’t most people?’

‘No! Of course they don’t.’