Free Murder of Gonzago by R. T. Raichev

No servants and no visitors .
    Her eyelids fluttered – closed.
    She dozed off.
    She had a dream.
    They were back at La Sorcière and her husband lay on the chaise longue and he was bleeding profusely from a wound in the back of his head. There was blood everywhere, on the floor, on the walls, even on the ceiling, the whole room glistened with it. Then the french windows burst open and someone dressed in white and wearing the Bottom head sauntered in, calling out breezily, ‘Anyone for tennis?’ A man. Only instead of a tennis racquet, he held a gun – and his voice was very much like her husband’s voice—
    She woke up.
    She rose to her feet. She felt sick. She couldn’t bear sitting another moment in the barn-like drawing room with its crimson-clad walls, hung in 1895 and now faded to a shade of raspberry fool, huge crystal chandeliers that brought to mind inverted fountains, Ming vases, Remnant portraits painted by the likes of Gainsborough, Reynolds, de Lázló, Sargent and Lucian Freud.
    Mr Quin. She was expecting a call from Mr Quin. Mr Quin had her in his power. She needed to obey Mr Quin’s orders. She shut her eyes. I pray and hope I die before I go mad, she thought.
    It was only midday, but it was getting darker by the minute. Twilight at noon. How she hated England! She longed to go back to the Caribbean. That morning she had woken up filled with the depressing foreknowledge that it would be another day of unmitigated misery …
    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 bitpart 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