The Riddle of Sphinx Island

by R. T. Raichev

  ‘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 a
gain 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.

  30

  DARKNESS FALLS

  Outside the rain was pouring.

  ‘I remember jigsaw puzzles on card tables that never got finished,’ Sybil said.

  ‘I remember not loving Paris in the springtime,’ Lady Grylls said.

  ‘I remember, I remember the house where I was born – the little window –’

  ‘No, no. We can’t have poems, Fever. Didn’t you hear what Nellie said?’

  ‘Oh sorry, darling. Um. I remember disapproving of order and symmetry.’

  ‘I remember not knowing my catechism, nor understanding what an oath is,’ Lady Grylls said.

  ‘I remember my brother describing the sea as a pointillist picture. I remember accepting the anguish of ageing.’

  It was the next moment that the lights went out and complete darkness engulfed the island.

  ‘Damn,’ Feversham said. ‘That rather puts the tin hat on, doesn’t it?’

  They were sitting in what Sybil had referred to as ‘mama’s morning room’.

  ‘I’ve got a torch somewhere. Oh there it is.’ Sybil turned on the torch. ‘We could run the engine in the cellar, get it going. Perhaps you and Major Payne could do it between you, Fever?’

  ‘I must say, my dear, you are handling this latest crisis with laudable aplomb,’ Lady Grylls said.

  ‘May I suggest we leave our expedition to the cellar for tomorrow morning? There are several packets of candles in the kitchen, I noticed,’ Feversham said. ‘We could use those for tonight, if people don’t mind frightfully?’

  ‘You are afraid of the dark, admit it!’ Sybil teased him.

  ‘No, not at all. All right, maybe the tiniest bit.’

  Lady Grylls pushed her glasses up her nose. ‘I was thinking of going to bed, but I can wait till you bring the candles. I doubt I’ll be up to navigating the stairs in the dark. I don’t suppose you would want an old baroness with a broken neck on top of everything else, would you?’

  ‘We most certainly would not. Are you sure you will be all right, Nellie, sitting alone in the dark?’

  ‘Perfectly sure. At my age, Sybil, there are few things that scare me.’

  ‘According to the Chinese,’ said Feversham, ‘the years between sixty and seventy are the richest in living and one is then most appreciative of the beauty and delight of life.’

  ‘I am well over eighty, alas. I’d give anything to be sixty-five again,’ Lady Grylls said. ‘I was in my element at sixty-five … I don’t think I will be the next victim somehow … Famous last words!’ She laughed.

  The door closed behind Feversham and Sybil and the morning room was plunged into impenetrable darkness.

  Lady Grylls adjusted the woollen rug across her knees. No, she wasn’t afraid of the dark … She mustn’t fall asleep in her armchair … Pins and needles in her left leg … Would make getting up later on a bore …

  Who was the killer? Doctor Klein seemed to be ‘indicated’, but there were other possibilities … Little Maisie, for example … She and John had talked through the keyhole, like Pyramus and Thisbe, she’d admitted as much … What if John had taken a fancy to Maisie? Lady Grylls had joked about it, but what if John had hit on a scheme to employ Maisie’s services? What if they had come to some understanding?

  John wanted to be rid of Ramskritt since Ramskritt intended to deprive him of the island … John might have commissioned Maisie to murder Oswald Ramskritt for him – in return for – what? His hand in marriage? Yes. The notion was not as laughable as it sounded.

  Lady Grylls didn’t think Maisie had any illusions about Ramskritt, how could she? To start with, yes. Not after her ordeal. Maisie gave every impression of being endearingly naive and refreshingly straightforward, but what if that was only a front? Maisie might have said yes to John’s proposal. American gels did fall for mad English aristocrats. So many novels had been written on the subject. Quite a tradition at one time … The Duke of Marlborough had married Consuelo Vanderbilt … Adele Astaire had married the younger son of the Duke of Devonshire … Then there was Mrs Simpson … Then there was the Downton nonsense … As it happened, two of Lady Grylls’ cousins had also married Americans …

  Lady Grylls yawned. John might have a supply of cyanide – perhaps he’d used it to poison seagulls or something … John was mad as a hatter … He might have given the cyanide to Maisie … Maisie had been the only person who’d stood near Oswald Ramskritt’s glass of champagne in the drawing room … How easy it would have been for her to drop a lump of cyanide into the champagne …

  Lady Grylls nodded to herself, satisfied with her own logic.

  Maisie Lettering sat huddled in a chair in her room, staring at the flickering candlelight, her slender arms hugging her shoulders. She brought to mind a bird that had dashed its head against glass and had been picked up by a human hand. The bird crouches there terrified, unable to move, hoping to save itself by its immobility …

  Oswald hadn’t been the man she had taken him to be. Her great respect for him had disappeared after he tried to violate her … And he had treated those poor German girls terribly…She had started hating Oswald … She recalled the revulsion she felt when Oswald said he wanted her to stand by his side and how she had tried to hide her true feelings …

  John de Coverley said he had as much need for candles as he needed a third leg. The extravagance of it! One could be excused for imagining his sister was attempting to recreate Brompton Oratory. He said he rather liked the idea of sitting in the dark. ‘Actually, I’ve got a torch somewhere as well as my battery-operated lantern. If you are not careful with those candles, you may set the place ablaze, you know. I’d never forgive you if you did. Unlike you, I am attached to Mauldeley.’

  ‘I see you are in good spirits, dear boy,’ Sybil said. ‘I am so glad.’

  ‘Can I have my gun back, do you think? It is, after all, registered under my name.’ John de Coverley peered at his watch. ‘I’ll need to go out soon, you know.’

  ‘That would be quite impossible, I fear.’

  ‘You don’t mean I am still under house arrest?’

  ‘You are not under arrest. All you need is a good rest. It’s getting late. Why don’t you go to bed?’

  ‘I never heard a proposition I liked the sound of less. I need exercise. You are stopping me from having exercise.’

  ‘I will tell what you could do,’ she said. ‘Toss a pack of playing cards on the floor and then pick them up one by one. That’s one of the most marvellous exercises there is. Apparently our dear Queen and several Cabinet ministers swear by it.’

  ‘Who is that chap lurking behind you?’ John de Coverley pointed his forefinger.

  ‘He is not lurking. He is one of my guests.’

  ‘Is he you
r lover?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘You have that complacent secret smile. Your mug is smoother, as if a hand has passed over your skin and conjured away all the etchings of advanced middle age.’

  ‘No, not advanced.’

  ‘Your features should be worn with dissipation but they are not. You look repulsively rejuvenated. You positively glow. That’s what happens when women start imagining someone’s in love with them. I say, that chap looks a bit like papa!’

  ‘He does, doesn’t he?’

  John grimaced. ‘Ugly things really hurt me, you know. You used to be as demure as an early Victorian bride, Sybil, but you look quite different now. I believe you are wearing lipstick. If you are not careful, you will soon start resembling one of those ghastly middle-aged grandes horizontales. Painted, powdered and predatory.’

  ‘I do think you should go to bed, John.’

  ‘The trouble with you, Sybil, is that you are too easily steered off course. It is imperative that you should get a proper occupation,’ he went on sternly. ‘Some sort of a reassuring routine to buttress your inner self that will keep you from getting pernicious ideas. I used to know a woman who found arranging multi-coloured skeins of silk in an alabaster box fulfilling.’

  ‘Shall I make you a cup of camomile tea? It will calm you down.’

  ‘That chap looks a frightful cad. All through my life I have been governed by one golden rule – and I am perfectly prepared to tell you – or anyone else who happens to be interested – what it is. Give the cad the bum-rush.’

  ‘He is not a cad. His name is Feversham.’

  ‘I heard you and your so-called guests smashing up the library this morning. Something happened this morning, didn’t it? One of your degraded orgies, no doubt.’

  ‘Nothing happened. Nothing at all.’

  ‘You and your so-called guests should be shut up in a dungeon and fed with the tails of haddocks, two a day, till you all perish of pure indigestion. I do think it’s time for the troupe, as they say, to be disbanded.’