The Riddle of Sphinx Island (15 page)

‘Why should he?’ Payne cocked an eyebrow. ‘Are you suggesting it was he who strangled your sister?’

‘No, of course not. Sorry. I don’t care much for him, that’s all. Sometimes a chap takes against a fellow for no apparent reason.’

‘Couldn’t
you
brave the waves? We were given to understand you were a first-class sailor.’

‘Were you? Good heavens. Someone must have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. I am afraid I know nothing about boats – complete wash-out as a sailor – get most awfully seasick. So you see, you’ve
got
to investigate. You are our only hope. You and your charming wife. You’ve had experience in matters of violent death. You know exactly what’s to be done. Your aunt told us all about it.’

‘My aunt often gets frightfully muddled –’

‘She said you knew the kind of questions that should be asked,’ John de Coverley persisted. ‘She said you knew what to look out for. How to set about things. I am sure you can find the killer before the police come. You can begin by checking everybody’s alibi –’

‘That would be highly irregular.’

‘The killer is clearly one of us – well, it isn’t me, but it’s one of the people staying under this roof.’ John de Coverley counted on his fingers. ‘Ramskritt, Ella, Maisie, Doctor Klein, Mrs Garrison-Gore. No one seems to have any idea where Doctor Klein has disappeared to.’ He frowned. ‘What’s the point of having a doctor in the house when he vanishes into thin air just when his services are most in demand? Perhaps you should consider Doctor Klein with extra care.’

‘You think I should?’

They were still standing in the corridor outside the library door. Payne had crossed his arms. He had asked everybody else, including Antonia, to go to the drawing room.

‘I’d hate to prejudice you in one way or another, but there’s something damned peculiar about Doctor Klein. I can’t quite say what, though … I think we could eliminate your aunt from the list of suspects.’

‘Indeed we could. Jolly decent of you to say so.’ I am giving stock responses, Payne thought. Part of me continues to treat this as a game. My mind seems unable to grasp the fact that there has been a murder in the house.

‘I believe your aunt was with you, wasn’t she? I mean at the crucial time?’

‘That is correct. We were in the drawing room. We never for a moment lost sight of my aunt. My aunt is as innocent as the sacrificial lamb.’ I shouldn’t be flippant, Payne reminded himself. ‘Are you sure there is no one else in the house?’

‘Positive. No one but us ten – no,
nine
– keep forgetting poor Sybil’s gone. You don’t suppose someone is hiding somewhere? We could conduct a search, of course, should you insist, but it would be a waste of time. There are no priests’ holes anywhere in the house, if that’s what you’re thinking. Wrong period. No underground tunnels connecting the island with the mainland either, though, during the war, papa seriously considered the possibility. I am sure it would have cost him a pretty penny.’

Payne said that neither his wife nor he had any legal right to ask anyone any questions.

‘But it could be
days
before we manage to inform the police!’ John de Coverley cried in tones of despair. ‘We are cut off. Completely cut off. And one of us is a killer!’

There was a pause. Payne watched him thoughtfully as he tried to fix his monocle in his eye.

‘Why do you bother?’ Payne’s voice suddenly sounded weary. ‘It is only plain glass. Unlike
this
one –’

With the air of a magician who is performing a well-known and rather tedious trick which he wants to finish fast before moving on to something of more general interest, Major Payne produced an almost identical-looking eyeglass attached to a piece of black silk ribbon. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is the real thing.’

His host’s face, he noticed with interest, became utterly blank, not merely expressionless but
deserted
– as if there was no one behind it. And when he spoke, it was in a voice that was a little different from the one he had been employing so far. ‘Where did you find it?’

‘It was clutched in her hand.’

‘In my sister’s hand?’

‘Yes,’ Payne said. ‘Even though she is not your sister. Let’s go to the drawing room, shall we? What I want to know is where exactly the Murder Game ends and the real murder starts – or could the two be in some way bizarrely entangled?’

‘Very well. Perhaps you will allow me to introduce myself. My name is Feversham. As the poet put it so aptly, the loathsome mask has finally fallen. Or was the mask merely tiresome?’

‘I think it was merely tiresome,’ Payne said as he watched him try to fix his monocle once more.

‘I am sure it was “loathsome”. In a way I am glad. Terribly glad. It’s a relief. It’s dangerous remaining “in character” for too long. One could remain trapped. I know it sounds terribly unlikely but it’s known to happen. Psychiatrists have a word for it, though at the moment the precise technical term escapes me.’ Feversham seemed to be speaking out of a kind of daze. ‘Being found out is the common fate of fraudsters and impostors, but it isn’t quite that in my case. Not quite the case.’

‘Are you a professional actor?’

‘Indeed I am, Major Payne. Indeed I am. For my sins.
As an unperfect actor on the stage, who with his fear is put beside his part.
I should stop saying things twice. Have you noticed how I tend to say things twice? That’s a mannerism I decided “John de Coverley”
would
have. Once I get my teeth into a part, I find it frightfully hard to get out of it. So you noticed that the blasted monocle was made of plain glass, what?’

‘That – and the fact that you are right-handed whereas the real John de Coverley is left-handed. His sister told us.’

‘She did? What else?’

‘We saw Ella taking a plate of fried chicken to a room upstairs. Sybil had told us that chicken was John’s favourite dish. Ella looked a trifle furtive. John is supposed to bear everybody under this roof a terrible grudge. Besides, he nearly blew off Ramskritt’s head. You have been too tame and too amiable. A completely different character altogether. The real John is a good sailor – while you, in your own admission, are a complete wash-out.’

‘Did I say “wash-out”? How observant of you.’

‘Besides, you kept flirting with Sybil and she blushed girlishly and clearly welcomed your advances in a singularly un-sisterly manner.’

‘Was that so obvious?’

‘Well, yes.’

Feversham said that forbidden passion between siblings was not that uncommon. It happened more often than people imagined, especially among the upper echelons of society.

‘You may be right. Not between these particular siblings, though. Sybil warned us that relations between her and her brother were extremely strained.’

‘Are you always so uncannily accurate in your deductions?’

‘Not always,’ said Payne. ‘Most of the time, perhaps.’

‘Well, I was asked to play the part of Sybil’s brother John de Coverley. Romany – Mrs G-G – knows me. I’ve already taken part in a couple of Murder Weekends she’s organised in the past. Various moat hotels, you know. The grub is awfully good and they let you have drinks on the house, as many as you wish.’

‘I believe you are a character actor?’

‘Indeed I am. I specialise in middle-aged buffers with a diplomatic background. Once I played a former royal aide, to great acclaim. I was “Holbrook” in
The Sleeping Prince
. Rattigan, you know. I was also “Sir Rowland Delahaye” in Agatha Christie’s
The
Spider’s Web
. This time, I was told, it would be different since the party was taking place at a private house on an island and everybody would be themselves, more or less. Romany encouraged us to perform prodigies of improvisation, invent whole loops of dialogue. Though of course the central situation was carefully thought through. It was to be staged with the minutest attention to detail.’

‘By “the central situation” you mean the murder,’ Payne said.

‘Yes, I do mean the murder.’ Feversham gave a little bow. ‘I was going to impersonate someone who was in the house, but who was not going to appear at all. Sybil’s brother. The real John de Coverley is an eccentric recluse who never leaves his room – unless it is late at night – and whose prowling presence is generally viewed as an irksome if innocuous pastime.’

‘John was never approached and asked to play himself?’

‘No. They knew he would never have agreed to it. But Romany thought he was too good a character to omit. Well, according to Romany’s script, it was John who was to be unmasked as the Sphinx Island killer in the end. John, that is, as impersonated by me.’ Feversham paused. ‘Acting on Romany’s instructions, Sybil paid you a visit and told you she suspected one of her guests was planning to kill another. Meanwhile a letter was sent to you, purporting to be from the mad killer.’

‘So the Riddler was part of the game too,’ said Payne. ‘That was overegging the pudding a bit, wasn’t it?’

‘Romany wouldn’t have it any other way. She wrote the letter personally. She found some ancient bottle of ink the colour of old blood – used to belong to one of Sybil’s uncles, apparently. Romany said she wanted to make absolutely sure your curiosity was sufficiently aroused. She was keen on introducing a fantastical element into the story. Something
recherché
. I believe she came across a pile of old Batman comics in the library – that gave her the N. Nygmer idea. The murder was to take place on your very first night on the island. The body was to be found in the library.’

‘It was going to be Sybil’s body?’

‘Sybil would have been “strangled” with the cord of a gentleman’s dressing gown.
Not
with the curtain cord.’ Feversham held up his eyeglass. ‘Later the dressing gown cord would have be traced back to me – I mean to “John de Coverley”. You’d have been told that Sybil was heard talking to someone in the library – some ten minutes before her body was found.’

‘There would have been a witness to Sybil’s last words?’

‘Yes. That would have been Ella, or was it Maisie? Can’t remember exactly which. Sorry – it’s suddenly hit me that Sybil is dead,
really
dead. I liked her an awful lot, you know.’ Feversham’s hand went up to his eyes. ‘Ella – I believe it was Ella, yes – was going to report to you what she had overheard Sybil say.’

‘What was that?’

‘
Why did you make me go to the Paynes with this rigmarole? I insist on an explanation for the cock-and-bull tale you asked me to feed them. Why did you want me to say I suspected one of my guests was a murderer? I am fed up with humouring you. I do think you should see a doctor.
Words to that effect. Meant to suggest that the idea of a killer preparing to kill someone was John’s, that it was some kind of crazy amusement he had dreamt up, with which Sybil had agreed to collaborate.’

‘And we would have deduced that she had been talking to “John”. The
fake
John.
You.
This is all terribly complicated but I believe I see.’

‘There would have been an additional trail of clues leading to “John”. His motive would have been the island. He would have killed his sister after learning of her decision to sell the island to Oswald Ramskritt. Sybil had left the island to her brother in her will.’

‘Oh yes. She told us about it.’

‘Romany wanted to keep as close as possible to the real-life circumstances of her main characters,’ Feversham went on. ‘Or rather the circumstances of her actors. You would have discovered “John” made Sybil go to you with a cock-and-bull story about a killer. Sybil’s murder would have been made to look as though she had been silenced.’

‘I see. Or I believe I see … While all along there’d have been no earthly reason for her to have been silenced. I
see
. That would have been a mere “strategy of deception”. The desk drawer then contained no real evidence?’

‘No.’

‘And you cut the telephone wires as part of the game?’

‘I didn’t. I was only to
say
it, but not actually do it. Someone else must have cut the wires – the
real
killer – unless it was the wind – do phone wires go under the sea? I was meant to make Sybil look dead by applying make-up – blue for bruises – a rubber band around the neck, little rubber bands round the wrists, so that you couldn’t feel any pulse … A cruel trick, I know, but we wouldn’t have kept you in the dark for long, I promise you.’

‘Someone strangled Sybil for real,’ Payne said. ‘Any idea who that might be?’

‘I haven’t the foggiest.’ Feversham sniffed. ‘I can’t believe I won’t see her again. I miss her already. I miss her dreadfully. We’d been getting on like a house on fire. She loved my impersonations, you know. She said I reminded her of her father who’d been endowed with charm, a fineness of spirit and notable intelligence. I feel pole-axed.’ Feversham dabbed at his eyes with a silk handkerchief. ‘Positively pole-axed.
’

‘I examined the body at twenty past ten. She was still warm. I imagine she had been dead for no more than ten or fifteen minutes. Where were you between ten and quarter past ten?’

‘I was in the dining room. I was looking for one of my cufflinks. Here it is.’ Feversham held up his left hand. ‘It was still there, under my chair. Did anyone see me? As it happens, Ramskritt did – he looked in and there I was on all fours. He said hallo. He and I chatted for a bit and then Mrs G-G appeared and – um – said she wondered whether poor Sybil was ready for the corpse make-up.’

To start with Mrs Garrison-Gore’s voice was steady. ‘I was only following your aunt’s instructions.
Make it as complicated as you can – remember they are awfully clever.
Your aunt said that you have
le gout du policier
. She said you believed that murder followed you wherever you went. She said you’d been feeling jaded and that what you needed was an intellectual challenge to get you out of the doldrums.’