The Death of Corinne
R. T. Raichev
Prologue
She lay sprawled on her back, the black beret still incongruously on her head. The ugly lopsided face was the colour of tallow, which is also the colour of tripe. I remembered that in France tripe soup was a favoured dish, and for a moment I feared I might be sick. I breathed in and out deeply, but my eyes remained fixed on her face. It was frozen in a ferocious grimace: eyes bulging, mouth open, teeth bared. One received the impression she had been snarling when death found her. Her tongue protruded between her teeth and it looked completely black, but that was probably due to the poor light in the greenhouse.
She had been shot. A lot of blood had oozed from the round hole in the side of her neck – it looked as though some monstrous wasp had stung her there. The bullet seemed to have hit the jugular. Her jacket and the scarf round her neck were stiff with blood and there was more, a congealed pool, surrounding her. The blood too looked black. It was obvious that she had been dead for several hours. Her mobile phone stuck out of a pocket in her breeches. The electric torch and the niblick we had seen her brandish the night before lay beside her, respectively on her left and her right sides. I found myself staring at her hands. On her right she wore a glove, but her left hand was bare. Her nails were long and scarlet and she wore two large-stoned rings.
It was then that I noticed the freakish detail. The little finger of her left hand was as long as her index finger. In some way I knew that to be important, extremely important, only I couldn’t think how.
I started feeling nauseous again and looked away from the corpse. That was the first time I had been inside the greenhouse. I saw shrubs and plants, some as tall as trees, whose names I did not know. Some of the plants were in a state of decay. I remembered Lady Grylls saying she couldn’t afford gardeners. Empty pots – blue-and-white Chinese containers-censers-garden tools. A garden bench. A rickety-looking bamboo table with a matching bamboo chair. A mobile phone lay on the floor beside the chair. I blinked. A second mobile phone? Whose phone was that?
I felt a violent tug at my arm. Nicholas. I had completely forgotten about him. ‘Miss, look! Over there -’
Antonia stopped writing and looked up with a frown.
I am making it sound like a story, she thought. She was writing in her diary, but it didn’t read like a diary entry at all. It read like a detective story… Death at Chalfont… Some such title.
She knew the significance of the long little finger. The reason for the death had been fully explained. She knew how the killer had got hold of the gun. (All right, not for certain, but they had a viable theory.) Most importantly – the identity of the killer was no longer a mystery. The whole enigmatic affair had been elucidated, yet, when she wrote in her diary about it, she indulged in deliberate obfuscation and set out to create suspense… Miss, look! Over there – Why, she had even broken off on a cliff-hanger! It was almost as though she were writing for an audience.
Antonia bit her lip, at once amused and annoyed with herself. She couldn’t help it, she supposed. Well, once a detective story writer, always a detective story writer, but then how many detective story writers got involved in real life murder mysteries? Not many, to her knowledge. In fact she couldn’t think of a single one outside fiction.
Her thoughts turned back to the fatal night… Dinner over, they had sat in the drawing room, sipping coffee. Rich and dark as the Aga Khan, Lady Grylls said. Hugh started describing some money-spinning son et lumiere venture with Chalfont at its centre – an ingenious installation involving wires and cables and hundreds of lights, all controlled from one point – wouldn’t his aunt consider it? Then the phone call had come.
What would have happened if they had called the police immediately after? That would have been the logical thing to do, wouldn’t it? Corinne had said they would do it the following day – but what if they had done it that same night? (Antonia couldn’t resist what-if questions.) Well, the police would have searched the grounds and they’d have managed to catch Eleanor Merchant without much difficulty. What then? Well, then there’d have been no murders.
No murders… Was it really as simple as that? What would have happened next? Antonia tapped her teeth with her pen. That poor girl’s misery would have continued and intensified and, sooner or later, she would have run away with the man she loved. Or would another murder attempt have been made before that?
It was the afternoon of 5th April and they were still at Chalfont. Antonia was sitting at the oak desk in what had once been Lord Grylls’s study. Her eyes passed absently over the ancient tobacco jar with a picture of a grouse in languid flight, the fleur-de-lis paperweight, the several outdated copies of Punch, the stamp albums bound in red vellum, The History of Quadrupeds and a book with the tantalizing title, Making Friends With a Badger. She glanced out of the window at the magnolia tree covered in unfurled buds, at the iron-grey sky above, then across at the yew-hedged garden, misty and dreamlike in the drizzle…
Looking down at her diary, Antonia started turning over the pages, going back. The funny thing was that she hadn’t read what she had written – not from start to finish. She was curious about the manner in which she had recorded the sequence of events leading up to the murders. She went back four days, to the first day of the month.
April Fool’s Day.
That was when it had all started… They had had no idea at the time how appropriate the date would turn out to be.
1
A Murder is Announced
‘Somebody wants to kill her?’ said Antonia with a frown, her eyes on the photographs on the mantelpiece.
‘Well, she’s been receiving death threats through the post. She sounded absolutely terrified. I knew you would be interested, my dear. This is up your street, isn’t it?’ Lady Grylls wheezed and she adjusted herself in the large chintz chair to hand Major Payne his cup. ‘Quite up your street. Do have some cake. You investigated that extraordinary business of the lost child together, didn’t you? That’s how you met. Talk about whirlwind romances!’
‘I wouldn’t call it investigating. We just went nosing around, asking questions. We were curious,’ Antonia said lightly. It had been more than mere curiosity on her part, at least at the start. She had been racked with guilt. A totally irrational reaction, she had realized soon enough.
‘Do you think you might use all that as “copy”? Not necessarily for your next novel but one day?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Really? Not even if you changed all the names and the setting? Poor taste, I suppose. Pity. It’d make a marvellous book. One of those that keep you up all night. Why do extraordinary things happen to some people while others lead such perfectly dull lives? I know I may live to regret my fatal craving for the picturesque and yet I can’t help myself. The tea’s not too weak, is it, Hughie?’
‘It’s just right, Aunt Nellie,’ Major Payne reassured her.
Lady Grylls was his late mother’s sister. He had five other aunts, all of them alive, though in various stages of decrepitude. Lady Grylls was his favourite and, despite failing eyesight and a bad smoking habit, the one who was in the best of health and displayed the liveliest of spirits. He directed an affectionate glance at her across the tea table. Seventy-three if a day, pug-faced, compact and stocky, though with remarkably elegant ankles, she was clad in a tweed two-piece that was a bit too tight for her and bulged in unexpected places, a fact that didn’t seem to bother her in the least. She wore a single string of pearls around her neck. Her hair was bluish-grey and carefully coiffed and she wore thick bifocal glasses, which kept sliding down her nose.