Free Suspicious Circumstances by Patrick Quentin Page A

‘It’s all right. I know you were all at Norma's. Pam told me. Uncle, that fuddy-duddy act! The fake entry in the diary! When did you make it? On the actual night?’
    Uncle Hans looked at us shyly. ‘Ach, how embarrassing that you have found me out for the wicked old crook that I am.’ In spite of himself, he couldn’t keep his pride from showing. ‘As a matter of fact, yes, I wrote it on the actual night. When we came home — so much excitement, aye! — and I sat down to write my diary, I thought: Is this suitable for a diary, Hans. In these days with servants you do not know, with all these terrible scandal magazines always ready to pounce on the great and the famous? No, it is not, I said. So instead I invented a more suitable evening.’ He grinned sheepishly. ‘It was fortunate, wasn’t it?’
    ‘Fortunate!’ echoed Gino. ‘It was genius. Good old Uncle Hans — the genius of the family. Boy, did you fix that cop!’
    ‘Did he?’ I asked, more than prepared to be convinced because being convinced was so much more pleasant than not being convinced.
    ‘Sure,’ said Gino. ‘Of course he was fooled. Why not? Some cranky anonymous letter? A big star like Anny? Who’s going to believe a cranky anonymous letter about a big star like Anny when Uncle Hans’s got it written down in his book that she was sitting right here at the time?’
    I felt a lovely warm glow.
    ‘Then we can forget it? We don’t even have to tell Mother?’
    ‘Tell Anny?’ said Gino. ‘You out of your mind? Getting her all het-up for nothing just before the funeral?’
    He stopped then, putting a large finger conspiratorially to his lips, for a commotion had broken loose at the head of the stairs and Mother, escorted by Pam and Delight, all in various degrees of chic black, came hurrying down towards us.
    None of them could have noticed the Inspector’s car, for no one made any mention of it and, in a few seconds, Mother was bustling us all off to the Mercedes. Tray made a fuss trying to clamber in with us, but Pam outfoxed him by ordering him to play dead. As we drove away, he was left stretched out like a corpse on the front steps, and all the way to Ronnie’s Mother rehearsed us for the TV cameras.
    ‘They will be at the church doors, dears, and possibly at the grave. Remember. Always keep your mouths slightly open. Not gaping, of course, but slightly open. And if a columnist or a reporter wants to interview you, which they may, just be simple and natural and speak from the heart.’
    Soon we reached Ronnie’s gatehouse and started purring up the drive along which Pam and Tray had run on The Night. The house, infinitely macabre to me, loomed in front of us, the largest French château off the Loire. We all piled out on the drive, where two black funereal limousines with black funereal chauffeurs were parked. A butler opened the door and there we were in the hall by the huge Juan Gris, with the staircase sweeping up ahead of us. I wished I had enough moral courage to face it all unflinchingly, but I hadn’t.
    I just stood with my head full of plunges and anonymous letters, and then, when I saw Delight staring at the staircase, obviously thinking the most unmentionable thoughts, I couldn’t face it and looked down at my shoes.
    It was the greatest mistake I ever made because I was not only looking at my shoes, I was looking at Ronnie’s floor. And right there, splashed across the Mexican tiles, I saw a succession of faint but quite unmistakable paw-marks.
    And they weren’t just paw-marks; they were infinitely worse than that; they were spaced at the most grotesque distances from each other. No ordinary dog could have made them. They could only have been left by an unordinary, monstrous, somersaulting dog.
    It didn’t surprise me, knowing California servants, that Tray’s paw-prints should still be there four days later, but, as I looked at them, a dreadful, completely reinterpreted memory of Inspector Robinson’s