Under the Guise of Death

by Under the Guise of Death (retail) (epub)

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  “Worthless prig,” Arundell whispered in Lady Bantham’s ear.

  She poked him with her elbow. “Shut up. He’ll hear you. He’s already upset.”

  “Upset? What for?”

  “You should know.” Anger rushed through her veins at his innocent tone and expression, but she forced herself to keep her voice down as she hissed, “You sent the parcel this afternoon. It worked. He’s livid.”

  “I don’t want him to be livid. Besides, what parcel?”

  She couldn’t reply any more, as they had stepped outside where their boat was waiting. A gondolier in white shirt and dark trousers stood waiting for them with his head down. Lord Bantham helped Larissa into the gondola, then Lady Bantham. He gave Arundell a disgusted look before seating himself beside Larissa and starting an animated conversation about the beautiful night, even pointing up to the full moon above.

  Lady Bantham looked at it as well, noticing it had a sort of reddish hue to it. It probably meant nothing but it made her shiver.

  The gondolier used his oar to push the boat away from the dock and then dipped it into the water. After the rush of the day it was now quieter; however, on Venice’s canals it was never completely still. As soon as they turned into the wider canal, there were other gondolas ahead of them and coming up from behind. Laughter and voices mingled on the air. Scents of spiced cooking drowned out the smell of the stale water, and Lady Bantham raised a perfumed handkerchief to her nose. She always carried one to parties where the presence of too many people could create a stifling atmosphere.

  Arundell smiled at her and leaned over. “Not feeling well? Are you finally carrying his child?”

  So that was what he had come for. To find out if she was doing what she was supposed to do, like a breeding mare. Provide Bantham with a child, a son, an heir. His deceased wife had been pregnant when she died in the accident, that tragic event robbing him of his entire future. It had been kept out of the newspapers and had only much later trickled back into society, a mere rumour, a whisper people passed on with sad faces and shakes of the head. How terrible, tragic.

  Arundell had heard as well and told her that the easiest way to ensure her grip on her husband was to bear him a child, a son, as soon as possible. “You’re young and healthy,” he had said casually. “It should be easy enough.”

  But her husband seemed more interested in parties with his friends than coming to their bedchamber at night. And now, looking at his head with that preposterous harlequin hat, leaning closely, confidentially, towards Larissa Kenwood, she wondered if there was a special reason for his aloofness. Larissa had been a close friend of his first wife and a regular house guest. Had they already had an affair back then?

  But why had he not married Larissa after his wife had suddenly died? That would have been their chance. A golden opportunity. Instead he had spent his time mourning, then staying abroad for months until he had finally returned to London where she had found him and pursued him. He had seemed willing enough to fall into her arms.

  Why had he not chosen Larissa Kenwood when he could do so, freely? She might not have a title but she came from a very wealthy family and two of her sisters had already married into the peerage.

  Lady Bantham puzzled over the problem as she watched the intimacy between her husband and her alleged friend unfold right in front of her. They talked, laughed and although they didn’t touch each other, they need not, to appear perfectly happy in each other’s company.

  Arundell whispered, “You must put pressure on him or you’ll lose him. A divorce would be a total disgrace.”

  “For you or for me?” She cast him a vicious look. This had been her plan, her strategy to secure her future. He had only come into it later. Against her wishes. She had known from the start it was ill advised. But she had had no choice in the matter.

  She clenched her perfumed handkerchief. Once upon a time she had believed that once she had wealth and position, life would be easier than it had ever been for her. But in truth it was harder. She began to see more and more, day by day, that getting riches, attaining a status was just the start of it. Then you had to hang on to what you had and preferably attain more. It was an endless battle, for your husband’s affection, the respect of your acquaintances, a constant race to have the best fashions, to make others envious so they’d work to be your friend.

  More often than not, however, they became your enemies. She felt like she had a lot of enemies waiting for her to make one wrong move, and then they’d come for her like a pack of dogs to tear her apart. Oh, they claimed to be civilized, but she knew better. They were feral, brutal once they were unleashed. And her entire life hung in the balance.

  Lord Bantham turned to them and said, “Time to put on our masks.” He slipped his in place: stark white with just holes for the eyes and the mouth. Often she felt like his face was like that mask, a clean canvas without emotions. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking or planning.

  Planning with Larissa Kenwood?

  The woman had slipped her own mask in place, made of delicate satin with embroidered patterns of peacocks and roses. Everything about her was overdone. The only good thing was she had left that horrid dog of hers at home. It snapped at everyone and constantly begged for attention.

  She glanced at Arundell who had secured his black silk mask. It completed his assassin’s outfit. She felt like he had been sent to keep an eye on her, to see if she would perform. If not, it would be the end of it. The end of her. She should never have accepted his money. But without it she couldn’t have achieved her aim, found her way to Bantham and this marriage.

  The gondola came to a halt and Bantham helped Larissa alight from it. She laughed about something, her head held back, her soft white neck exposed. For a moment Lady Bantham wished she could grab that neck with her bare hands and strangle the woman so that her idiotic laughter died down.

  “Smile,” Arundell whispered at her as he grabbed her elbow to assist her. “Play the game, your ladyship. And play it well.”

  Chapter Four

  “This was not exactly what I had in mind.”

  Jasper, former inspector of Scotland Yard, shifted his weight in the tight jaeger’s costume his friend had lent him. Especially the hat with the feather; something frivolous Jasper abhorred, even though he could appreciate the subtle connection between the part allotted to him tonight and his former profession. His host had always had that kind of humour.

  Jasper had met Alessandro Vernassi, in charge of maintaining law and order in Venice, years ago when he had worked on a case of stolen jewels which had ended up in the floating city. That cooperation had been so pleasant and their mutual interests – literature about crime, renaissance architecture and good food – so well matched that they had stayed in touch. Vernassi had visited London shortly before Jasper had retired and it had finally seemed the time to repay that visit and come to Italy.

  At the prospect of pasta and zabaglione, accompanied by some of the best wines from the region, Jasper had felt reinvigorated, but right now he just felt hot and uncomfortable. Having been married to his work, he couldn’t recall when he had last been to a party, let alone a decadent fancy dress up party at a palazzo.

  “The host tonight is a merchant who imports our beautiful Venetian silks to your country. He has been coming here for so many years he’s practically one of us.”

  “I thought a non-Venetian could never truly become one of you.”

  “Well, politeness requires we treat him as such.”

  Jasper suppressed a smile. Vernassi was a typical example of how he had come to know the Italians: always polite, always smiling and making promises that everything would be taken care of soon, to forget about you again the next moment when they were promising the same thing to someone else. Perhaps it was the more leisurely approach of the Mediterranean, where afternoon naps were customary and work could always be postponed until another day.

  “Don’t look so downcast, my friend.” Vernassi
patted him on the shoulder. “You will have a good time tonight. If only because you like classical music and we will be treated to one of the greatest violinists alive today.”

  “Venetian, I suppose,” Jasper said, familiar with Vernassi’s tendency to consider anything from his hometown the best there could ever be.

  “Of course. We have always been the capital of music. Leonardo learned his art from the finest. Maestro Marco Marcheti performed in Vienna with Richard Strauss.”

  Jasper made a non-committal sound. He did appreciate classical music but the mention of a Strauss reminded him of that king of the waltz, Johann Strauss, and the element of parties Jasper loathed beyond all else: dancing. He could only hope that because of the costumed nature of the feast tonight he could take a role as bystander and quietly observe whatever was going on.

  “I believed retirement would make you less serious and more what you call…” Vernassi looked for the right English word. “Adventurous. You must allow our beautiful city to seduce you. That is what she does, lure people to her and make them fall in love with her.”

  Jasper gave him a wan smile. “Just a few days ago, I left the most idyllic island in the world, a place of which the locals would claim all those things you are now saying about Venice. Delightful, enchanting. But I solved several murders there. It seems like…”

  He wanted to say, “Wherever I go, murder will follow,” but it almost felt provocative to say so. Even after all the killings he had been involved in professionally, he still had a deep respect for death and for the consequences it had on people’s lives.

  “Murders on an idyllic island?” Vernassi tilted his head. “Several as well? You must tell me all about it. Later. Now we’ve arrived.”

  Unfortunately, yes. Jasper threw an envious look at a duck paddling the water of the canal ahead, shimmering with the glow of the full moon overhead. That duck could glide along these mysterious waterways all night, listening to the sounds of a city going to sleep but never quite at rest. While he had to go inside and make polite conversation and try not to stew in his ridiculous costume.

  They got out of their gondola on to a dock decked out with braziers leading the way to the palazzo’s entrance. The scent of flowers was heavy on the air, and Jasper detected white roses worked into a bow framing the open doors. Delicate music flowed out towards them, luring them closer, and for a moment he told himself the evening might not be that bad.

  That hopeful sensation evaporated upon entry. People in the most extravagant, colourful costumes milled around, greeting each other and picking drinks off trays carried by waiters who were also robed and masked. The light from the giant chandelier overhead reflected on the gold masks, precious stones worn by the numerous ladies, and glasses raised in a toast.

  Voices bundled together into a raging wave crashed across Jasper. The rapid Italian mixed with his mother tongue, but also words of other languages thrown in. He believed he heard Spanish, German and French. Perhaps also Russian, or another Slavic tongue?

  While his ears tried to pick out the words, his nose was assaulted by more floral scents and a mixture of sweet and spicy perfumes, riding on a vague undercurrent of sweat as it was quite hot inside.

  Silks and satins brushed past him as ladies in towering wigs full of pearly clasps whirled to mingle, their high-pitched laughter mixing with the music he could suddenly hear again. Eerie flutes and a demanding mandolin trembled on the hot air.

  His mind began to whirl as if caught in a carousel, disorientated and dazed.

  He was about to turn and run to breathe the night air outside, indulge in the quiet of the dock where only that lone duck quacked, when Vernassi took his arm and led him through the crowd. “I will introduce you to our host.”

  Working with his elbows, Vernassi made a path for them and soon they reached an elderly man dressed in a stark white toga. His costume seemed deceptively simple compared to that of some of his guests, but the golden laurel crown on his head suggested he imagined himself to be not an ordinary Roman, but an emperor. Jasper wondered which one. Some had been poisoned or stabbed, others had gone mad.

  “Alessandro!” Their host reached out both hands to embrace Vernassi and kissed him on the cheek. Jasper held back, hoping this welcome treatment would not apply to him.

  Vernassi said, “This is former inspector Jasper, from Scotland Yard, staying with me for a few days. Our host, Sir James Lovelane.”

  Sir James gave Jasper a piercing look. “Oh yes. You…” His reluctance was tangible and Jasper narrowed his eyes. Had he met Sir James before? Should he recall?

  Sir James forced himself with visible exertion to say, “You investigated the accidental death of my daughter.”

  “I did?” Jasper was startled, searching quickly for the case the man referred to, but not coming up with anything under the name Lovelane. It wasn’t common so he should remember.

  “Lady Bantham,” Sir James said. “She died in a car accident.”

  In a flash Jasper was back at the country estate of Lord Bantham, a typical English squire with a portly posture, a hound following him around and a much younger wife who had to bear him a much-wanted heir. She had gone to London for a hat or dress, and the car had swerved off the road, plunged down the steep bank and smashed into the sturdy trunk of an age-old oak. The coroner had declared she had probably been killed upon contact. If not, the subsequent explosion of the engine and the fire, with lots of smoke, had done their part. Lord Bantham had about fainted away when he had come to identify the remains at the morgue. A sad case, for all parties involved.

  “My condolences,” Jasper said to the bereaved father. “I’m sorry we were never able to find the other driver.” The idea had been that Lady Bantham must have tried to avoid collision with another car for her to have gone off the road like she had, as all had declared she was a careful driver. A reluctant one even, her best friend had said. It had made it unusual that she had chosen to drive herself and not employ her husband’s chauffeur. But Jasper had never said anything to that point. It was not his place to speculate about what the late Lady Bantham had really been after in London.

  It had been odd as well that she had sent her maid ahead by train, carrying some of her jewellery. Why not take it herself in the car? That had to have been safer.

  “I’m glad you could trace some of the missing jewels,” Sir James said. “Not that the jewels meant that much in the light of Olivia’s death but… I couldn’t stand the thought of that girl Agnes having them.”

  Jasper refrained from pointing out that the maid had taken money for part of them, leaving a gem-studded tiara and a heavy gold bracelet at a pawn shop where the police had eventually recovered them and returned them to Lord Bantham. Agnes was probably still living off that money and the profits of the other jewels she had stolen when she had run after the accident. Several eardrops, bracelets and rings had never turned up.

  He frowned. Had Agnes known Lady Bantham was going to die? Had she somehow contributed to her death? He didn’t quite see how, unless Agnes had had a boyfriend with a car who had driven Lady Bantham off the road. A tricky thing to try as she might have avoided collision with the tree and survived to testify about the other driver.

  No, it had to be a case of the maid taking advantage of the circumstances, suddenly finding herself alone in London with a fortune in gemstones, and selling off her dead mistress’s property to ensure a better life for herself. The pawnbroker had said the girl had laughed out loud when she had left the shop with her money.

  Such little details always stuck in Jasper’s mind. Mere opportunity had turned a devoted maid into a thief enjoying her sudden good luck, without a second thought for the criminal nature of her behaviour.

  Sir James gestured to a passing waiter and offered his guests champagne. He lifted his own glass and said to Jasper, “To justice. May it always prevail.”

  Jasper touched his glass to his host’s. “To justice.”

  Chapter Five

&nbs
p; “Not long now, carissima,” Leonardo whispered to the violin as he put it down on a polished table. The atmosphere in the room was hot and stuffy despite the doors into the inner yard being open. He walked out and stood a moment breathing in the scent of the tropical plants mixed with an odour of damp earth. The gardener had apparently watered the plants shortly before.

  Water rushed from the gaping mouth of a stone lion’s head into a basin with white flowers floating on the surface. In a cage beside it, colourful birds leaped from twig to twig even attaching themselves to the wire of their habitat every now and then. Their lighthearted chatter dissolved the tension in Leonardo’s chest. He walked to the cage and studied the birds with a smile, remembering his grandmother’s canary that had lived in her kitchen, purely for a practical purpose. If the stove produced toxic fumes, the canary was the first to die, saving the lives of his mistress and her family. Leonardo had often given the bird a few seeds, when his grandmother wasn’t around to scold him for spoiling the animal. But the bird had been their keeper, their protector, and for that it deserved a little extra.

  A rustle behind him made him turn his head. Annoyance flashed through him that some admirer had found him and would want to fawn over him about his magnificent playing or invite him to yet another party. Before a performance he needed to concentrate and didn’t want to see any people.

  But there was no one there. At least not on the path. There seemed to be movement in the bush. A flash of something red. A hint of female laughter.

  Leonardo stood frozen to the mosaic tiles under his feet. A red dress, a teasing woman luring him deep into a garden with her enticing laughter. Another time, another lifetime even, it seemed. She had died and he had lived on, regretting he had not chosen her openly and told Marcheti he could find himself another dog to perform tricks for him.

  She had died. Still she was here. The red dress peeking through the bush. Her laughter floating on the air.