Syl had said once she looked a bit like Marilyn Monroe. She was miming ‘I Wanna Be Loved By You’, in front of the mirror. She put the dark glasses back on.
She had been taking a range of drugs, including lithium and Sarafem, for her anxiety and depression. What she really felt like doing was smoking a reefer, but at the thought of Stephan feeling suicidal at Sans Souci, she decided against it. No. No drugs.
‘I am the twelfth countess of this thousand-year-old place,’ she said aloud. For some reason the sound of her cracked voice made her feel marginally better. She went on speaking to an imaginary audience. ‘Remnant Castle contains fifty-eight rooms and eleven intricately carved staircases. It’s a classic example of opulent and gilded decay.’
The distance between the main dining room and the nearest kitchen was a hundred metres. The roof, on the other hand, covered an acre and not once in living memory had it been completely watertight. She could hear a dripping sound now from somewhere. The corridor walls were covered in satin and gold and hung with faded tapestries of mythical birds. She passed by ornate mirrors and perfectly pointless consoles, little couches and marble tables and a lot of pictures in gilded frames.
Remnant Castle had once been an Augustinian priory, consecrated in 937 and dedicated to some saint or other. It had become the property of her husband’s family at the Dissolution of Monasteries in the 1530s. The earliest part of the building dated from between the third and fifth centuries.
The daughter of minor gentry, she had been brought up in an elegant enough Georgian townhouse in Upton-upon-Severn, but it hadn’t exactly prepared her for the transplant to this monstrosity of a mansion, which spoke eloquently of times more spacious than the present and sported thirty-five chimneys on its roof.
She spoke again. ‘In one of the cellars there is a semicircular protuberance in the wall that cannot be accounted for by any ordinary architectural rule. Here, it is said, many years ago a blaspheming monk was walled up alive, and sometimes, in the depths of the night, his ghost can be heard moaning and tearing at the walls of his prison.’
What was that? Something scurried, slithered and squeaked inside the wainscoting. No, not the monk — rats? Were they trying to gnaw their way out? That would be the final straw — armies of rats rampaging at Remnant! She had seen a dead rat once in the corridor outside her bedroom, lying on its back, its pink paws disconcertingly bringing to mind the hands of a human child.
Clarissa suddenly recalled the time she had been pregnant with Stephan. How he had moved inside her — kicking — wriggling like a fish. She had felt an incomparable joy unlike anything she had known before — or since. Tears welled up in her eyes. My baby, she whispered. My baby, I miss you so.
She must tell Tradewell to set traps or call the exterminator, before it was too late. No, she couldn’t. She kept forgetting she had dispensed with her butler.
Clarissa had started walking fast — faster and faster — she nearly broke into a run. She forced herself to stop. She wondered if she was in a state of hypomania. Syl had warned her about it.
Passing by a bronze statue representing Actaeon set upon by hounds, she was filled with terrible pity. ‘You poor wretched thing, I know exactly how you feel,’ she murmured. She took out her mobile phone. It was on. Didn’t need recharging either.
He had said he would phone her. It wouldn’t do to miss his call. It would make him cross. She dreaded hearing his voice. Oh, how she dreaded it.
This is all a little bit too much, she thought. The truth is I can’t cope. I am scared. I am edging towards the abyss. I am on the verge of collapse. I have got myself involved in murder and deception of the most bizarre kind.
11
The weather was damp, the air filled with the reek of rotting leaves. Basil Hunter couldn’t say he was enjoying his desolate ramble, but he had been quite unable to stand the familiar atmosphere of solid, unchanging monotony that reigned in his house. He had found it difficult to breathe.
At one point the sight of Louise reclining in the window seat, looking like a bloated Buddha, or Jabba the Hutt, breathing like a suction pump, gazing at him yearningly, had caused his intense annoyance to mount into furious rage. He had decided to go out, to prevent a conflagration.
Things seemed the same, yet they would never be the same. In a peculiar way Lord Remnant’s violent death had triggered something in his mind, something he had never suspected was there …
He discovered he was walking in the direction of Remnant Regis and soon enough he saw the castle rising in the mist, not unlike some crouching primeval monster with spikes on its back — that was what the chimneys made it look like.
Set in a kind of valley, next to a grey-watered artificial lake, Remnant Castle was surrounded by oaks, beeches and chestnuts of great size and strange growth. Long untrimmed branches dangled to the ground and creaked whenever the wind blew. There was a park on the other side, but it was invisible from where he stood. The lake was enshrouded in mists in most seasons, diaphanous and delicate in summer, thick and blighting in winter.
He raised his binoculars to his eyes. Somebody was turning on the lights at Remnant. How was Clarissa coping? When he had spoken to her at the crematorium, he had offered his services. She had allowed him to hold her hand in his for at least half a minute. He would have held it longer, but Louise had been hovering in the background, making impatient noises, sighing heavily, damn her. Clarissa had thanked him and said she would call him if she needed anything. She had sounded as though she meant it. She had looked him straight in the eye.
He wanted to see her. He longed to hear her voice. He could walk up to her front door and present himself. No, not yet. He shouldn’t act on an impulse. He was not the sort of man who took foolish and unnecessary risks — with one notable exception …
The Hunters lived at Clarenden Farm, set among acres and acres of land less than a quarter of a mile from Remnant Castle. They had been neighbours of the Remnants for quite a bit, though he’d never imagined they’d become anything like friends. He had been surprised when Clarissa had asked them for drinks, then to dinner, then to tea, then for drinks again; and had finally issued the invitation for a visit to their very own island.
Why had they been invited? They were not exactly Clarissa’s sort of people. Not as some kind of camouflage for Clarissa’s affair with the doctor, surely? That was what Louise had suggested. Louise was a nasty cat. He never ceased to marvel at the fascinating depths of his wife’s inexhaustible banality. Louise had gone out of her way to poison his mind against Clarissa. Louise was jealous. Terribly jealous. Well, there was nothing he could do about it.
Would things be different now that Lord Remnant was dead? Perhaps Clarissa would phone and ask him over for a drink. She owed him a lot. That was what she had told him the night Lord Remnant died.
What a night it had been …
The air had seemed full of electricity. They had stood about and stared … It was he and Sylvester-Sale who had eventually carried the body up the stairs — not to the master bedroom, Clarissa had said, but to Lord Remnant’s dressing room next door. They had laid the body on some kind of couch.