The Riddle of Sphinx Island (28 page)
‘Had she already started contemplating killing Oswald?’ Lady Grylls asked.
‘I believe so, yes … She leans over Klein – he wakes up – a struggled ensues – with her hands in tartan gloves she gets hold of his mouth and prises it open – he bites her – but she manages to push the lump of cyanide into his mouth.’
‘How perfectly brutal. There was something of the beast about her, I always thought,’ Sybil de Coverley said. She was sitting next to Feversham and they were holding hands.
‘So the cyanide belonged to Klein?’ Lady Grylls said.
‘Yes. Doctor Klein seemed to have wanted to kill Ramskritt but never managed to make up his mind. Remember, he was not a well man. He gave the impression he was suffering from general slowing-down of reactions. He never hinted at what he might do, did he? He never mentioned – revenge?’ Payne glanced at Ella Gales.
‘No. Never. I think he – she – was fascinated by Oswald – by the discrepancy between the way Oswald saw himself and the way he really was. He was interested in studying him.’
‘Explain the mechanics of the murder to me, Hughie, would you?’ Lady Grylls urged.
‘Mrs Garrison-Gore carried the cyanide in her bag. She was getting quite desperate. The storm gave her the idea, I think. It was she who hurled the silver bullet pen at one of the library’s French windows, thus displaying a great power of imaginative improvisation. She wanted to cause a distraction, which she succeeded in doing. In the chaos that followed she dropped the cyanide into Ramskritt’s champagne glass. Later on she killed Klein using the remaining cyanide.’
‘Why did she kill Doctor Klein?’
‘My theory is that she was afraid Klein might have noticed some of his cyanide was missing. She feared he would tell the police about it. She was paranoid. She clearly feared she would have been considered the obvious suspect, you see – since her room was next to Klein’s and there was only a low partition separating the two balconies.’
Antonia said, ‘She must also have hoped that by killing Doctor Klein, she would bring about a closure to the case. Klein, after all, was the most obvious suspect. He clearly had murder on his mind. Mrs Garrison-Gore wanted to make it look as though Klein killed Ramskritt and then, either tormented by guilt or simply not wanting to go on with his tragic existence, killed himself.’
‘Extraordinary. But why
was
the woman so desperate?’ Lady Grylls pushed her glasses up her nose. ‘It isn’t as though Ramskritt had threatened her with exposure, is it?’
‘Ramskritt’s torture methods were much subtler than any overt threats,’ Antonia said. ‘Ramskritt specialised in oblique hints and innuendo. He started playing a cat-and-mouse game with her. That was his style. That was the kind of thing Ramskritt enjoyed best. Isn’t that so?’
‘Yes,’ Ella said. ‘That’s what he liked to do to women. He enjoyed intimidating them. He was a mental sadist.’
‘So
la
Garrison-Gore’s crime was cribbing … Passing other people’s books off as her own?’
‘Oswald Ramskritt cottoned on to the fact that Mrs Garrison-Gore had been plagiarising out-of-print, out-of-copyright whodunnits from the early
1930
s, which were in the public domain on the Internet, on Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg publishes Shakespeare and Dickens whereas Gutenberg
Lite
specialises in lighter fiction. Completely forgotten authors like Canon Victor L. Whitechurch, Edgar Jepson, Milward Kennedy and so on. When Oswald read bits from the novel she was in the process of writing, he noticed how she was changing names of characters and places.’
‘That,’ Payne explained, ‘was the real meaning of his recurrent teasing –
old lamps for the new.’
‘He congratulated her on being “enterprising”. He spoke teasingly, in mocking tones. He made it absolutely clear to her that he was aware of what she was up to. He also suggested he might phone her publisher. He talked about it in front of everybody – he made it sound like a joke but she took it seriously. She felt threatened.’
Payne said, ‘Mrs Garrison-Gore had had four flops, but then she published what we could assume was the first of the plagiarised, if modified, whodunnits, to considerable acclaim. She was worried that, if exposed as a fraud and a cheat, she would face ruin. Incidentally, this is all almost entirely conjectural. Her literary reputation was going to suffer – she might even be taken to court – her publisher would drop her and no other publisher would ever offer her a contract – she would become “untouchable” – beyond the pale!’
‘But how
likely
was any of that?’ Sybil de Coverley asked.
‘Maybe not terribly likely, but that’s what she
feared
. We believe she suffered from anxiety and depression and perhaps some sort of paranoid disorder. She was scared Ramskritt would at some point choose to make his discovery public. Well, she couldn’t allow that. So she decided to kill him.’
Feversham said, ‘She tried to throw suspicion on me – suggested she had lent me the pen and that I’d never returned it to her. I was sure that I had, but she managed to fluster me, blast her.’
Sybil said, ‘I can’t get the bullet pen out of my head, the way she distracted us by throwing it at the window! Something a stage conjuror might have done.’
‘We believe that for a while Mrs Garrison-Gore did work as a conjuror,’ said Antonia. ‘We didn’t know whether to believe it or not, but perhaps that story wasn’t as apocryphal as we thought it was. Her sleight of hand was reputed to have become the stuff of legends.’
‘How did you know she had a bite mark on her hand, Payne?’ Feversham put up his eyeglass.
‘I noticed how Mrs Garrison-Gore kept rubbing her right hand. She was in pain. She kept her gloves on. She said she had an allergy but she looked terrified when I suggested she might have been bitten … It was one of my inspired guesses … She gave herself away, but she managed to pull herself together and started talking about the possibility that she might have been bitten by
bugs
.’
‘There are no bugs in my house!’ Sybil said imperiously.
There was a pause.
‘Where
is
Maisie?’ Lady Grylls peered round.
‘I believe she is upstairs talking to my brother. I have an idea he is proposing marriage to her … He looked terribly solemn the last time I saw him … Do get me a light, Fever,’ Sybil produced a cigarette. ‘Well, John is welcome to the island … We are going to be very rich anyway, so I couldn’t care less what happens to the island. In fact, I don’t want to know … Do get me that ashtray, Fever, there’s a good boy.’
‘There was one thing Mrs Garrison-Gore got
completely
wrong. She said that naval men and military men were “a bit alike”,’ Payne said with feeling, ‘
No
similarity whatever.’
‘I believe it was her fear of DNA that killed her,’ Antonia said thoughtfully. ‘She knew they would have found Doctor Klein’s DNA on her … She said she would rather die than write a murder mystery set in modern times, didn’t she? One could quip that Mrs Garrison-Gore chose to die rather than
be
in a murder mystery set in modern times.’
R.T. Raichev is a writer and researcher who grew up in Bulgaria and wrote his university dissertation on English crime fiction. He has lived in London since 1989, and all seven of his previous Antonia Darcy and Major Payne mysteries have been published by Constable in the UK and Soho Press in the USA. The
Riddle of Sphinx Island
is his first novel with The Mystery Press.
First published in 2013
The History Press
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