She intended to turn on every single chandelier and she was going to light all the candles. Her instructions hadn’t included having to keep Remnant sunk in gloom. Thank God for small mercies. She laughed shrilly and at once felt the ache in her throat that preceded tears.
As she walked across the drawing room and opened the door she tried to divide her thoughts into manageable portions and make sense of the events of the last ten days.
She might have been the abbess of a nunnery heading for a private audience with the Pope. Her face was free of make-up and her short fair hair was entirely concealed by a black chiffon scarf; her black dress was loose and long, though her slender ankles were clad in black silk and she wore vaguely erotic black high-heeled shoes.
She was also wearing enormous round black sunglasses, which was odd of her, she knew, one didn’t wear sunglasses indoors, especially not in England, but they dramatized her lightly bronzed face, which was an effect she rather liked. But her carefully cultivated Grenadin tan had started to fade and she needed to do something about it. The moment I stop caring how I look will be the absolute unconditional end, she thought. She paused to light a cigarette and dropped the match on the floor.
Not so long ago there had been an insolent air of authority about Clarissa, of confidence, of arrogance even, also of carelessness and insouciance; she had managed to display the negligent drop-dead chic with which a mannequin swishes down a catwalk.
No more. She was aware that she was walking rather stiffly, stagily, self-consciously; she might have had a bit part in some amateur production. She almost expected the director to shout and halt her and order her to start again, to walk away and do it again, properly…
Catching sight of her reflection in one of the murky mottled mirrors made her shudder. She took off her dark glasses. The Bride of Frankenstein, she mouthed. She had lost a lot of weight. She looked preternaturally ethereal; thinner than ever before! Beneath the fading tan she was as pale as an ivory opium pipe. Well, she had hardly eaten a thing for heaven knew how long. She had been subsisting on the odd bowl of soup and cups of strong Arabica roast, which, she suspected, accounted for the panic attacks she had been having.
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.