It was half past eleven now, the storm had abated somewhat, though it was still raining. The company had dispersed and Antonia and Hugh Payne were trying to see people individually.
‘Can you smell fear?’ Sybil de Coverley asked. ‘I read somewhere that detectives can smell fear and that can lead them to the guilty party.’
‘We are not detectives,’ Payne said.
‘Of course you are. I am sure you are insanely thorough and exhaustive. The smell of fear met them, sour as a sickroom miasma. That was the sentence I came across in a book, though I can’t remember which book it was.’
‘You mustn’t believe everything you read in books.’ Antonia gave a little smile.
‘I keep thinking of the vagaries of Fate, you know. If the storm hadn’t smashed the library window, Oswald might have been alive now. I mean, his champagne was most probably poisoned in the library and it must have happened after the French window got smashed – we all looked in the direction of the explosion, didn’t we? I can’t help thinking that the killer took advantage of the chaos.’
‘Is there cyanide in the house?’ Payne asked.
‘I wouldn’t have thought so. We’ve never had wasps’ nests or rodents or anything of that sort. I don’t recall my parents ever referring to cyanide. Cyanide. Sorry. I am an inveterate Scrabble player, that’s all. Comes before cybernation and cyclamen. I mean in the dictionary.’
‘What about your brother? Has he never mentioned cyanide?’
‘I don’t think so. Of course John hated the idea of the island changing hands – but how could he have contrived to poison Oswald’s champagne given that he never left his room?’
‘He couldn’t have,’ Antonia said.
‘I think the two of you are quite terrifying.’ Sybil shuddered. ‘You bring to mind a pair of surgeons approaching the operating table for a difficult and dangerous operation … Can you think of a motive I might have had for killing Oswald?’
‘You might have formed a powerful and somewhat irrational attachment to someone who benefits financially from Ramskritt’s death. You might have become obsessed with this man – who happens to be in dire straights. He needs money badly – you have marriage on the mind – you are determined to help him – by hook or by crook – so you kill Ramskritt.’
‘Most ingenious, but, as it happens, no such man exists!’
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you about your pill box,’ Antonia said. ‘Where is it? May I see it?’
‘My pill box? I seem to have mislaid it. It was so silly of Romany to suggest I might have carried cyanide in it, wasn’t it?’ Sybil glanced at the clock. ‘What about some brunch? I would hate to be caught out in dereliction of my duties as a hostess. I am sue you are feeling peckish. I’ll see to it.’
‘That’s terribly kind of you,’ Payne said.
Sybil left the room.
Antonia frowned. ‘What is cybernation?’
‘Control by machines, I think.’
‘Sybil said something very interesting, actually. It’s given me food for thought …’
‘Oh? What’s that?’
‘One of those “what if” questions,’ said Antonia. ‘What if Fate hadn’t intervened? What if there had been no storm? What if the library window hadn’t smashed? What if our attention hadn’t been diverted? Would Oswald Ramskritt have lived?’
‘Anything, yes. Anything that might be interpreted as out of the ordinary.’
‘Well, I did notice something, but I don’t think it’s of any importance,’ said Maisie. She sat on the edge of her chair. She looked very young.
‘What was that?’
‘I’d hate to waste your time. All right. It was a light. There was a sudden little light in the library. I saw it flash in the middle of the room. It happened for a split second. I immediately forgot about it – so much happened after that – only a moment later there came the blast – the window exploding – the wind and the rain – books flying – then we went to the library and Oswald died …’ Her voice trailed off.
‘A sudden light … How very interesting,’ Payne said. ‘We could do with a little light right now – we are still labouring in Cimmerian darkness.’
‘No one flicked a lighter, did they?’ Antonia said. ‘Or struck a match?’
‘I don’t think so. No one lit a cigarette or a candle or anything of the kind.’ Payne stroked his jaw with his forefinger. ‘Perhaps it was Tinker Bell deciding to put in a sudden appearance? Or was it a stray firefly? Could it have been a signal? But who would have wanted to send a signal to whom and with what?’ He shook his head.
At midday they had brunch. Scrambled eggs on buttered toast and tea. Earl Grey for Payne, Lady Grey for Antonia (which Payne thought somewhat twee – apparently it had been Maisie’s idea – like His and Her bath towels, which the Paynes most definitely did not keep in their bathroom in Hampstead). This was followed by roly-poly pudding with lots and lots of jam, which, as it happened, Payne liked and Antonia didn’t.
Mrs Garrison-Gore marched in as the clock was chiming the half hour.
Her eyes were puffy. Her face sagged.
‘I feel dog tired. I shouldn’t have drunk that champagne. I get high, but then I get terribly low,’ Mrs Garrison-Gore said. ‘I tried to have a nap in my room, but couldn’t. Doctor Klein next door was singing in that padded voice of his. It gave me the horrors.’
‘We were given to understand he was asleep,’ Payne said.
‘Maybe he sings in his sleep? Some people do. There was a certain incantatory repetitiveness to it, which I found jolly disturbing. I was put in mind of some compulsive ritual that was devoid of rational significance. I seem to have lost my silver bullet pen. I am sure Feversham stole it.’ Mrs Garrison-Gore started crying quietly into her handkerchief. ‘Everything’s gone wrong. Everything. I wish I didn’t feel so low. I feel the irrepressible urge to scream.’ She blew her nose. ‘No, don’t worry. I won’t do it.’
‘Did you by any chance notice a little light flashing in the middle of the library?’ Antonia asked. ‘Seconds before the window smashed?’
Mrs Garrison-Gore dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. ‘What kind of light?’
‘We have no idea. Maisie believes she saw a light.’
‘Only one of the table lamps was on … There wasn’t lightning, was there?’
‘Everybody would have noticed lightning,’ Payne said. ‘Apparently this was a very tiny light, or so Maisie claims.’
‘No. No. I saw nothing. Is that important?’
‘It seems an insignificant little thing but I don’t need to tell you how tantalising details like that can be.’
‘I know exactly what you mean. Have you ever organised a Murder Game?’ Mrs Garrison-Gore asked.
‘No, never. We were approached once, I remember, but we said no.’ Antonia smiled at the memory.
‘The money was good. But we smelled a rat,’ Payne said. ‘We suspected the whole thing was going to be used as a cover for something sinister, didn’t we, my love?’
‘The venue was one of the grandest country houses in England,’ said Antonia. ‘We were sworn to secrecy, so I can’t tell you the name … We were asked to provide the script, act as advisors and generally supervise the whole thing … Unlike you, we didn’t have to provide a single actor. The actors were already there, at the house. All we needed to do was work out the details of the plot.’
Mrs Garrison-Gore sniffed. ‘I didn’t have to provide any bloody actor either.’
‘Didn’t you? We thought you did.’ Payne’s left eyebrow went up. ‘What about Feversham? Feversham was your idea, wasn’t he? That’s what we were given to understand.’
‘No, he wasn’t. Feversham was Oswald Ramskritt’s idea.’
‘In re Ramskritt – may I ditch the de mortuis dictum and speak with a degree of bluntness instead?’ Feversham said. ‘May I?’
‘Please do,’ Payne said.
‘I wouldn’t have called him a decent fellow. It wasn’t immediately apparent, but Doctor Jekyll could have taken a leaf out of Ramskritt’s book. Perhaps he had something and couldn’t help himself? One of those conditions. Tourette’s Syndrome? That’s not only to do with spontaneous swearing, is it?’
‘That’s to do with making socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks,’ said Antonia. ‘Tourette’s Syndrome sufferers also twitch, I believe.’
‘Ramskritt didn’t twitch but when he was shot at, he went mad, quite mad. Got DD. Disgustingly drunk. Didn’t look it, which is always a bad sign. I believe he was an alcoholic. Made a total nuisance of himself. Slapped poor Ella’s face. How she put up with him, I have no idea.’
‘Ramskritt slapped Ella’s face?’
‘Indeed he did. I saw it with my own eyes. I was at the other end of the corridor. They didn’t see me. Gave me quite a turn. Poor Ella – poor Maisie – and for that matter, poor Romany.’
‘Why poor Romany?’ Antonia asked.
‘Ramskritt teased her mercilessly about her books. About the fact that she writes Golden Age pastiches – and the fact she used Gutenberg Lite.’
‘Oh – all that old lamps for the new business?’
‘Yes. He had no sense of proportion. He just went on and on. But I have a specific incident in mind. It happened that same day, after he got DD. By an extraordinary coincidence, I happened to be passing by the study Romany had been using. Ramskritt was sitting beside the desk, reading out bits from the book she was writing and making fun of the way she changed names of characters and places. He called her “spoilt” because she had the Internet at her disposal. The Internet practically wrote her books for her, some such thing. I could see that it upset her.’
Antonia said, ‘Upset her enough to make her want to poison him?’
‘I’d have said no. Poison is a woman’s weapon, if one believes the popular myth, though I rather doubt Romany is the malefactor in this particular instance. I wouldn’t have called her a wonderfully balanced character, but she is by no means a homicidal loon. I believe Ramskritt got a serious kick out of rattling people. He called me an old fool –’
‘Who is “old Bonwell”?’ Payne asked. ‘Or Bonewell?’
‘As it happens, my father’s name is Bonwell.’ For a moment Feversham looked confused.
‘And is Norah perhaps your mother?’
‘My mother? Is this some game?’ The next moment Feversham slapped his forehead with his hand. It was a particularly histrionic gesture. ‘Good lord. You probably mean that silly piece of dialogue Ramskritt and I exchanged at tea on the day of your arrival? Oh that was nothing, my dear fellow, nothing at all. Romany instructed us to extemporise. We were all saying silly things at tea that day. Awfully silly things. A positive orgy of silliness, if I remember correctly.’ Feversham had started speaking very fast. ‘Things like, “I detest people who make helpless gestures” and so on. At the time of course I had no idea what an impossible fellow Ramskritt was, but then he was perfectly amiable to start with … But what a wonderful memory you have! You should have been an actor, you know.’
‘As a matter of fact I did consider the stage at one point. Talking of actors,’ Payne said, ‘I understand that it was actually Oswald Ramskritt who recommended you to Mrs Garrison-Gore?’
‘Ramskritt? No, of course not! Wherever did you get the idea?’ Feversham’s monocle fell off his eye. Suddenly he looked frightened.
‘Mrs Garrison-Gore told us that you were chosen to play the part of John de Coverley on Oswald Ramskritt’s recommendation,’ Payne said.
‘Poor Romany must have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. She hasn’t been herself, you know. If I were you, I would take everything she said with a pinch of salt.’
The afternoon was spreading like blood floating in water.
Mrs Garrison-Gore sat hunched over her battery-operated laptop. She was trying to write in the hope it would take her mind off things. Well, not bad – as similes went, that is – but was it her own or had she come across that particular simile in somebody else’s book?
‘Romany, you must cease cannibalising other people’s books, or you’ll find yourself in hot water.’ She spoke the words aloud.
Taking a sip of coffee, she gazed balefully out of the window, at the sea below, glinting in the shadows. The waves crashed rhythmically against the unyielding cliffs. Suddenly another sound came: the disconcertingly human-like shriek of a gull. An angry but ultimately futile lament for the unhealable anguish of the world …
She really felt awful. Her ears reacted to the slightest sound. She longed for oblivion. She remembered how once, while on holiday in France, she’d visited a local museum where she had been shown a peculiar torture arrangement of the Middle Ages – an iron cage wherein prisoners had been confined and in which they could neither lie, stand nor sit. Well, that was the way she felt now. As though she’d been put inside that particular kind of iron cage!
‘I am my own prisoner,’ she said. ‘I am consumed with doubt and dread and vile intentions.’
For some reason her thoughts turned to her former husband. On one memorable occasion he told her she needed to be chastised for her soul’s sake –
It occurred to her that self-loathing had been her inseparable companion for some time now.
‘Unhealable anguish? You may not realise it, Romany, but you display an incorrigible taste for the bogus. Every word you write ought to be a prize item in any anthology of humbug.’
It was raining again.
Still no network. Major Payne put his mobile phone away. He shook his head. Being penned up on a small island with a devastated library and a dead body must be the ultimate in enervating experiences …
At five minutes past three in the afternoon they had tea brought to them in the dining room, which they now regarded as their ‘base’. It was so dark they had to turn on the lights.
Muffins, crumpets, pats of lightly salted butter, Devonshire cream, two kind of jam, strawberry and seedless raspberry, a variety of sandwiches: potted ham, egg-and-cress, cucumber on brown and white bread.
Tea, thank God for afternoon tea. As he picked up the silver knife and cut across a crumpet, Payne was struck yet again by the incongruity of it all.
At six o’clock, he asked Antonia, ‘What’s the most unusual solution you could think of?’
‘If I had to propound a theory, I’d say that the cyanide was intended for Klein. It was Ramskritt who put it into Klein’s glass. Ramskritt wanted Klein dead, silenced, because Klein could have created bad publicity for Ramskritt.’ Antonia paused. ‘Klein could have exposed Ramskritt’s spying activities, talked to the papers about Ramskritt’s awful treatment of the Hansen girls which led to Gabriele’s suicide and Freddie’s sex change and so on.’
‘But in the chaos that follows the smashing of the window, Ramskritt makes a mistake and picks up Klein’s glass?’
‘Precisely. Imagining it is his own. He takes a sip and dies. Though why should Ramskritt have been carrying cyanide in his pocket? He clearly had no idea as to Klein’s real identity, not till Klein told him. So he couldn’t have come down this morning, intending to poison Klein.’ Antonia sighed. ‘Makes no sense.’
‘Unless Ramskritt was only pretending he didn’t know who Doctor Klein was. What if someone had told him?’
It was at seven o’clock that they decided to talk to Doctor Klein. They asked Ella to see if he was awake and well enough.