The Riddle of Sphinx Island (10 page)

‘You have a brother? You have never mentioned a brother before.’

‘No. I told you it was a complicated story. I have a brother, yes. I do my best to keep my life separate from his. My brother works at the Vatican. He holds a high office. He is very close to the Holy Pontiff.’

‘I see.’

‘I care a lot about my brother. I don’t want to hurt him in any way. I don’t want him to know about the abortion. I would never forgive myself if he came to any harm. My brother is a truly holy man. He is a saint. I am not worthy of him. He is one of the most wonderful human beings who ever lived. Oswald said that if I did leave him, a couple of stories would appear in the newspapers in England, on the Continent, as well as in America. He said the stories had already been written.’

‘What kind of stories?’

‘He described them as “lurid, shocking and full of all kinds of repulsive details”. I am represented as a slut – a professional slut.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I have had as many abortions as I have had clients – I am immoral as well as amoral – I am hypocritical, insatiable, a nymphomaniac, highly manipulative and heaven knows what else. He also says there are pictures.’

‘What pictures?’

‘I don’t know what pictures. Compromising pictures. Nasty pictures. Shocking pictures. Something twisted and abominable. It makes me sick just thinking about it, wondering. Fear is the worst counsel, I know. There are no pictures. I’ve had no clients!’ She gave a hysterical laugh. ‘It’s probably something he’s fabricated or someone has done at his behest! You can do all sorts of things with a computer, can’t you? You can doctor photographs really cleverly. Oswald can have anything he asks for.
Anything
. I can’t bear the idea of any publicity, of having to explain myself, of being hounded. I can’t take any risks. I can’t.’

‘I don’t think he’d do it, Ella,’ Doctor Klein said gently. ‘He wouldn’t dare, but if he did, you could take him to court.’

‘I couldn’t. I haven’t got the guts. I am a coward, I keep telling you. I wish I were possessed of dauntless courage, but I am not … Two of the stories apparently concern my brother. Oswald hinted he knew things about my brother – vile, disgusting, unspeakable things. He never specified what exactly, but he says he’s got
evidence.
’ Ella’s voice shook. ‘That would be worse than anything that might be written about me –
much
worse
. I can’t bear the thought of my brother being caused pain … He is very sensitive … It would destroy him … And it would all be my fault … Oswald gets a kick out of intimidating people – of making people afraid – of humiliating people – No, not people –
women
– he does it only to women.’

‘He seems to enjoy degrading women, yes.’

‘He is mad,’ Ella whispered.

‘
Not clinically insane, only transcendentally wicked
. That, in case you wonder, was said about Adolph Hitler. I admit Oswald is an interesting case. But does he
really
want you to stay with him? I find this very curious. He has made it abundantly clear that he has a
schwarm
for Maisie.’

‘His
schwarm
for Maisie is simply a new element in the game he has been playing with me,’ Ella said. ‘Oswald wants me to stay and watch him being adored. It’s all so pathetic, but that’s the kind of person he is. He warned me not to discuss him with Maisie.
If you so much as open your mouth, Ella, if I hear that you’ve been trying to win her over to your side, you and your brother are finished.’

‘Ach. He relishes playing the bogeyman. Fear can be a powerful weapon in the hands of someone like Oswald. Because he is so rich and powerful, you have convinced yourself he can do anything he says … I think you should call his bluff.’

She shook her head violently. She couldn’t do it. She was not brave enough. ‘That’s why I am still with him –’ She broke off. ‘You don’t think Feversham is spying on us, do you? I keep seeing him creeping about each time we are together.’

‘Does Feversham creep about? I haven’t noticed.’

‘I don’t know. I may have imagined it. I’ve been sleeping badly … I really don’t know what to do … Perhaps I am doomed to spend the rest of my life with Oswald. What else
could
I possibly do? Kill myself? Kill Oswald? Fake my own death and disappear under a new identity? Pay someone to kill Oswald? Sometimes I get the craziest ideas. Do forgive me! I really don’t know what to do.’

‘Sometimes the craziest ideas are the best,’ Doctor Klein said gravely. ‘But materially Oswald is good to you, yes? You said he was a generous employer?’

‘Oh he is extremely generous. I can’t fault Oswald on
that
count. He pays me a very good salary. He makes sure I have everything I want. I have an unlimited access to cash. He gives me expensive presents. He never forgets my birthday. I am the proverbial bird in a gilded cage. Is my cheek still red?’

‘Not any more.’

‘Oswald seems to like the idea of a triangle … Before it was Martita, me and him. Now it is Maisie, me and him … I am sorry for that girl. She is the perfect innocent, isn’t she? What a night … full moon.’ Ella’s eyes remained fixed on the open window. There was a pause. ‘To think – to think that Oswald was nearly killed! That bullet might so easily have got him in the head. Have you thought of that?’

‘The thought did occur to me, yes,’ Doctor Klein said.

John de Coverley lay in bed. He kept slipping in and out of sleep but he wasn’t dreaming, not exactly, rather his mind was behaving in a manner not dissimilar to that of an ancient television set in an advanced stage of an electronic disease. He saw images that flickered and dissolved in monochrome chaos, then formed again indecisively as if behind some undulating flood.

One image slowly came into focus. Why, it was a seagull – a giant seagull! He would have loved to be able to shoot it but he had no gun – the gun had been taken away from him – but he saw he wore his thick leather gloves. If only he could catch up with it, he’d wring its neck. The creature kept flapping its wings and emitting worried squawking noises. Really it was most provoking. It was a new breed of seagull, John could see. The head looked quite human – a woman’s head – the same eyes as –

He woke up with a start. So he’d been dreaming after all.

What they did to me was outrageous, John thought. Unpardonable. They – his impossible sister’s houseguests – had put him under house arrest.

It was his impossible sister who was to blame for the whole thing.

What he felt like doing was wringing Sybil’s neck.

Sybil de Coverley couldn’t sleep either.

How
did
one make one’s warring brain raise the white flag? Reaching out, she turned on the bedside table light. She wondered if she should get up and make herself a cup of China tea and take a couple Neurophen Plus tablets, to which she had to admit she was becoming quite addicted. Or perhaps she could start reading some really boring book.

She had the feeling things were getting out of hand somewhat. She didn’t mean only her brother and the shooting in the library. Since her arrival she had been aware of tensions – she had seen conspiratorial looks pass between Ella and Doctor Klein and between Oswald and Feversham. Sybil wasn’t exactly
anxious
– she was never anxious – it was just a funny feeling she had, that something was about to happen.

Thank God there’d been no serious damage done to the library. No one read Gibbon anyway and in her opinion the portrait of Charles de Coverley had been greatly improved by the bullet hole. Charles de Coverley was one of her great-great-great uncles. He had been a High Court Judge, something of the sort. A stuffed shirt if there was one, if the portrait was anything to go by. The bullet had got him in the eye and now it looked as though he wore a piratical patch. It gave him a deliciously dissolute air. She’d always hated that portrait anyhow.

She found herself thinking about the new man, Feversham, whom she had accommodated in the room called ‘Charlotte Russe’.

She had taken a fancy to him. The moment she had seen him, she’d felt a small secret thrill creeping down her spine. He looked nothing like her brother, but he brought to mind papa. The same raffish charm. She had always had a thing about papa, when she was a girl. Oh dear! Sybil laughed at the memory. She sat up, opened her bedside table drawer and took out a cigarette. She didn’t smoke often, but she felt like it now.

She recalled how she had always compared papa to her beaux, or rather the other way round – those poor chaps who used to take her out dancing! She had been beastly to them. Far from nice. She had been impossibly imperious and made them do silly things, like pretend they were a polar bear or Harold Macmillan or the Sultan of Zanzibar. When they hesitated or didn’t do it properly, she’d stomped her foot and told them to go away and never come back.

She’d been terribly picky. Papa had been at his wits’ end. He’d wanted her safely married off to someone suitable. But each time a possible husband was paraded for her inspection, she said no. She’d been terrible! Sometimes she’d said it in French:
Non
.

Sybil struck a match and held it to her cigarette. Her hair was in a net and her face covered in cold cream. Most actors were fey violets, but Feversham seemed to be – well, quite the opposite. He was certainly susceptible to feminine charms. Feversham had taken to her in a big way, she did believe. She didn’t think he was after her money or after the island. She could always tell when people were mercenary in their intentions.

He told her he felt seasick the moment he had boarded Oswald Ramskritt’s yacht, which was a terribly good sign. He then told her she looked like Deborah Kerr, which was a jolly nice thing to say to a lady. Had she seen
From Here to
Eternity
? What about
An Affair to Remember
? That, as it happened, was one of her favourite films! Coincidence? She didn’t think so! Feversham was a dream that had fallen from Paradise.

When Sybil was eleven, a witch, or a woman who’d pretended to be a witch, told her that in the last thirty-three years of her life she would find unparalleled happiness with a man whose initial was F. or E. Sybil firmly believed in prophecies. On an earlier occasion the very same woman had told papa that an alien spaceship would land on his island, and it had happened! It had been the year of the Coronation – papa claimed he had seen the saucer’s reflection on the TV screen, as the Archbishop of Canterbury had placed the crown on Princess Elizabeth’s head. The saucer had moved in a gyratory fashion and there had been a sound resembling an organ that was in desperate need of tuning, papa said. Some five minutes later papa had seen the saucer’s reflection again as it had taken off.

Years later, when papa got caught in the hinge of the door between life and death and had only days left on this earth, he asked Sybil to help him down to the cellar and he showed her the strange piece of alien equipment, which, he claimed, the aliens had left behind, a most peculiar-looking object, a cross between a toaster and a giant pencil sharpener. Well, it was still there, on a shelf, gathering dust.

Sybil recalled how she had always wished that
her
prophecy didn’t come true too soon – she’d have hated it if it had happened when she turned thirty, say, for it would have meant she would die at sixty-three. On the other hand, she wouldn’t have been at all pleased if it had come to her at seventy – the idea of living to be a centenarian-plus filled her with horror. But now
– now
– was the right time.

Papa’s tartan gloves. She must give them to Feversham. A long time ago she’d decided she would make a present of papa’s tartan gloves to the man whom she intended to marry.

Sybil blew out smoke. A woman needed to be given every chance to fulfil herself through those two finest and most honourable of states: matrimony and motherhood. She wasn’t too old for the latter, she didn’t think. It was, after all, the twenty-first century; scientific miracles happened practically every day.

How old was Feversham? Her age, she imagined, or thereabout. He was divorced, he had informed her apropos of nothing in particular. He’d referred to his former wife as ‘quite the wrong kind of person’. As Sybil had handed him a cup of coffee after dinner, their hands had brushed. He’d also told her he’d sniffed cocaine on a couple of occasions – again, for no apparent reason. It was all terribly promising, to say the least.

She’d nearly confided in him her penchant for Neurophen Plus – that if one chewed five tablets, say, one felt like – well, like heaven, really – only one had to do it when one did
not
have a headache.

Feversham also told her he’d always believed the stage was his vocation, despite the fact he’d been to Gordonstoun and might have had a jolly successful army career.

Sybil frowned. She remembered that Oswald Ramskritt had sat not far away and that he appeared to be listening to their exchanges. There had been a curious expression on Oswald’s face, one she couldn’t quite make out … Knowing?

Mrs Garrison-Gore sat fully dressed beside her open window, glaring at the full moon. She was greatly perturbed. In fact, she was in quite a state. She was frightened. She had a sense of impending disaster.
She felt threatened
. Things had happened, which should never have been allowed to happen. Her life was already full of uncertainties and now a new one had been added. She had been, as she wrote in one of her books, ‘plunged into a tormented conundrum’.

She tried to pull her mind away from her worries. She thought of Doctor Klein, of what she had seen him do earlier in the day. Doctor Klein’s room was next to hers and they shared a balcony. His side was separated from her side by a low partition. By means of a small mirror which she held in her hand she had managed to spy on him. She was curious about him, extremely curious. Doctor Klein had no idea he was being watched. He had been inside his room, sitting on his bed.