The Little Victim

Book 4: Country House Crime Mystery Series

by R.T. Raichev

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries; Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

It promised to be the perfect holiday every modern convenience, exotic terraced gardens complete with an 'English' folly, thirty-eight varieties of ice-cream, cocktails with names like 'Widow's Wink' and 'Mumbay Mule'. Antonia and Hugh Payne never seriously imagined they would encounter anything worse than extravagance in this idyllic setting... But an uninvited guest at the garden party given in their honour makes Antonia Darcy his confidante. Not only does he claim to have witnessed the strangling of beautiful, wayward Marigold Leighton, he also insists it was their host Roman Songhera, the 'uncrowned king of Goa', who had committed the murder. 'You are the kind of woman who lets her imagination run riot', the Hon. Mrs Depleche warns Antonia - but then the murder witness mysteriously disappears and later turns up dead. And so, rather reluctantly, Antonia and Major Payne decide to set aside their pleasure-filled days, and investigate. Praise for R.T. Raichev's Previous Novels 'Fascinating and surreal.' Lady Antonia Fraser 'Clever and complex.' Francis Wyndham 'Splendidly oldfashioned sleuthery ... skilfully probes the surface smoothness of country houses ...couldn't put it down.' Hugh Massingberd 'This auspicious first in a new mystery series from Raichev... Agatha Christie fans will find much to like in this traditional whodunit.' Publishers Weekly

Release date: October 11, 2011

Publisher: C & R Crime

Print pages: 322

Sample

1

Lady Macbeth Of Noon’s Folly

‘He kisses her bedroom door each time he passes it. He thinks about her all the time.’ Lucasta Leighton made a despairing gesture. ‘He keeps talking about her. I do tell him to forget her. She’s gone. She’s made her choice, appalling as it is. She is no longer a child. She’s never going to return, she said so. He can’t do anything about it. She’s thousands of miles away. Well, he says he can’t give her up, not just like that, not his only daughter. He still believes she might be persuaded to come back, you see. When I tell him she won’t, he gets angry. He snaps at me.’


Lucasta’s voice was steady but her eyes were red, as though she had been crying. ‘Do have some more coffee, Iris,’ she urged her sister-in-law as she picked up the silver pot.

‘Thank you . . . Where’s Toby now?’ Iris Mason-Stubbs turned her mild bespectacled face apprehensively towards the door that led into her brother’s study. Toby had always made her nervous.

‘He went for a walk. He said he’d be back soon. He left forty-five minutes ago. He should have come back by now, really. I hope he’s all right.’

Noon’s Folly Cottage overlooked the woods. It was half past eleven in the morning but the sky outside was so overcast, it felt like late afternoon or early evening. The streetlights were on. It was always darker by the woods. Not the best day for a walk, Iris thought. She sat facing the french window. The chill mist had caught the back of her throat and made her cough the moment she had got out of the car and started walking towards the house. Swirls of mist – floating and clearing and rolling sluggishly back – like the tentacles of some fantastical creature from the very depths of the ocean – exploring – looking for prey? Something mesmeric about it. Below the thunders of the upper deep, Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea – His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep – The Kraken sleepeth. Did people still read Tennyson? The trees and giant ferns were obscured into shadowy silhouettes – everything outside appeared submerged – the streetlights were turning into blurs of watery, acid-green phosphorescence. So quiet too.


Toby would never come back. Toby had been snapped up by the monstrous Kraken. Iris felt at once disturbed and oddly comforted by the fanciful idea.

‘This is better, isn’t it?’ Lucasta had turned on the two table lamps. ‘Shall I put another log on the fire? Are you warm enough?’

‘I’m fine. Thank you.’

‘Are you sure? You look pinched.’

It was an attractive room done in silver-blue and maroon – Laura Ashley and Liberty’s – everything in its appointed place – the glass-top coffee table gleamed – not a speck of dust anywhere – quite unlike the cosy chaos that reigned in Iris’s drawing room. Iris didn’t really see any point in keeping her drawing room tidy. No matter how often they had it tidied up, it was a mess again in no time. Lucasta blamed the dogs and she kept telling her to get rid of them. Once Iris admitted she actually found muddy paws endearing and Lucasta stared at her as though she thought her completely off her head. They were so different. Henry said he could well imagine old Lucasta blowing off Fido’s head with a shotgun and not batting an eyelid.


Iris glanced at the books that lay on the coffee table. An Englishman’s Garden and An Englishwoman’s Home. Shouldn’t it have been the other way round? A novel by someone called Antonia Darcy – a detective story, judging by the cover – a gloomy Victorian Gothic mansion and such a sinister-looking tree. Iris thought she might enjoy it. Were the man with the pipe and the woman in the mink coat the detectives? Heaven knew what kind of danger awaited them inside, what fearful mystery, what tangles in need of tackling.


‘I am sure exercise is good for Toby,’ Iris said brightly and she raised her cup to her lips.

‘Maybe, but not in this damp weather.’ Lucasta’s face assumed a severe magisterial expression. ‘Yesterday he complained of chest pains. He sat slumped in his chair for what seemed like ages, his hand pressed against his heart. I was terribly worried. I wanted to ring for an ambulance but he wouldn’t hear of it. He refuses to go to the doctor, you see. He tells me not to fuss. Oh – that girl! That girl! It’s all her fault!’


‘I did think Toby looked ill the other day.’

‘He is ill. Hardly eats anything. Broods. Sleeps badly. Talks in his sleep. Keeps calling out her name. He gets up in the middle of the night and walks about the house . . . I pretend I’m asleep,’ Lucasta went on, ‘but I get up too and follow him. He has no idea I have been watching him. Please, Iris – not a word!’


‘My lips are sealed.’

‘He sits at his desk and writes letters to her. He always tears up the first draft and starts again. I’ve read all his letters. I piece them together, you see – in the morning. He holds conversations with her – imagines she is in the room with him – begs her to come back – promises her things – tells her how much he loves her – addresses her as his “dearest girl”. Then his mood changes and he gets angry and starts calling her names – oh, such dreadful names. Last night he started reminding her about the fire, when he saved her life and was nearly killed in the process.’

‘Ah, the fire.’ Iris nodded.

The fire had taken place sixteen years before. There had been an explosion – the mightiest of bangs followed by a ball of flame that had been seen from miles. Swaylands – her brother’s holiday cottage – had burnt to the ground. Imogen – Toby’s first wife – had suffered her first nervous breakdown as a result. Poor Toby had lost part of his little finger. There had been the suspicion that it was her niece who started the fire, after being refused something she’d set her heart on, ballet shoes or a pony, Iris couldn’t remember which.

‘D’you know what he said? He said he wouldn’t mind having all of his fingers chopped off, if that was the price he had to pay to have her back! I am afraid he’s losing his mind. He’s had the absurd idea of going and bringing her back.’ Lucasta shook her head. ‘Flying thousands and thousands of miles to the subcontinent, can you imagine?As though she’d listen to him! He’s going mad. Well, I do believe that’s her intention. She wants to drive him mad. That’s her revenge. She is a wicked, wicked girl!’


There was a waft of Hermes perfume as Lucasta rose from her armchair and crossed to the window. A tall, stately woman with a Roman nose and neatly arranged ghost-grey hair, she was wearing a high-collared purple dress and a brooch in the shape of what looked like a triton. She held her torso erect and, though clearly agitated, clasped her hands firmly before her. There was a hint of the monarch about Lucasta, a demeanour that was plus royaliste que la reine. She had kept her figure through gardening and good genes – she was a Furness – and of course she had never had any children.


Lucasta stood beside the french window, gazing intently into the gathering darkness. Like some faithful old dog, Iris thought. Iris knew everything about dogs – she had five. Such comedians! She could sit and watch their antics for hours. Iris had eaten a dog biscuit once and declared it actually tasted quite nice. She was also a voracious reader of books about dogs. Her favourite story came from the annals of 1930s Hollywood and concerned a male dog named Pat, a sort of canine drag artist. Pat had played Lassie in one of those marvellous old films and had become famous around the film studios as ‘the only star who could play a bitch better than Bette Davis’.


Would a story about a transvestite mutt lighten Lucasta’s mood? Of course it wouldn’t. Now, wasn’t it peculiar that Lucasta should detest dogs and yet dote on Toby, the most difficult of men? Her brother was impossibly opinionated, unutterably insensitive to anybody’s feelings but his own, given to the highest dudgeons imaginable, overbearing, short-tempered – the list was endless.

Lucasta and Toby had got married a year before, only two months after Imogen’s death. Lucasta had known Toby for more than thirty years. As it happened, she and Imogen had been childhood friends. Lucasta had nursed Imogen during the latter’s short illness and she had been there when the end had come. It was Lucasta who had made all the arrangements for the funeral, hired caterers for the baked meats, paid the nurse’s wages and provided her with references, had the house cleaned from top to bottom and despatched Imogen’s clothes to various charities, all neatly labelled. Lucasta had taken care of – well, of everything. She was that sort of woman. Fearsomely efficient. She makes me nervous, Iris thought.

Lucasta was fifty-seven or -eight and she had never been married before. Everybody had been surprised at the match, but in all fairness it had to be said that Lucasta and Toby actually had a lot in common – a fondness for country walks, the diaries of James Lee-Milne, gardens, the local Conservative club, the theatre. They also did the Times crossword and Sudoku together. Toby let Lucasta ‘manage’ him – he actually listened to her the way he did to no other woman. Well, they would have been leading a happy life together – a comfortable, quiet, mildly eccentric, pleasantly autumnal sort of life – but for this dreadful business of Toby’s daughter.


(How curious – not once so far had they referred to her niece by name! So far it had been ‘she’, ‘her’, ‘Toby’s daughter’ or ‘that girl’. Beyond the pale – that was where, by unspoken consent, they seemed to have relegated her niece.)

‘I don’t understand her. I really don’t,’ Lucasta was saying. ‘Personally I’ve never had any problems with her, mind. She’s always been perfectly civil to me. She never cast me in the role of the wicked stepmother or anything like that. She used to ask me questions about the garden.’

‘I don’t suppose Toby lets you read her letters?’

‘No. He’s extremely sensitive about them. With good reason!’

‘Oh? You mean . . .?’

‘Yes. I’ve read all of the letters. Toby has no idea. I know where he keeps them – inside Volume 5 of Famous Trials. You won’t breathe a word, will you, Iris? Toby would be furious if he knew.’


‘Haven’t you tried to intercept them – stop them from getting through to him?’

‘As a matter of fact I did try a couple of times, but he always manages to get them before me. He seems to have developed a sixth sense, so he is always up particularly early on the day they arrive. I even considered bribing the postman but we keep getting different ones.’ Lucasta sighed. ‘Toby stands in the hall in his dressing gown, perfectly still, staring at the door, waiting for the letter to hit the mat.’

‘How dreadful.’

‘He then takes the letter to his study, reads it several times, makes notes, and starts writing his reply.’

‘So she’s given him her address?’

‘She has. You seem surprised. That’s part of her game, don’t you see? It’s clear she expects him to write back, so that she can laugh at him and gloat over his misery and frustration. Each time a letter arrives Toby hopes – believes – she’ll tell him she’s coming back!’


‘What – what does she write about?’ Iris hoped her sister-in-law wouldn’t think her too ghoulish.

Two very bright red spots appeared on Lucasta’s cheekbones, but she spoke in a composed enough voice. ‘Well, she tells him in some detail about the kind of things she does.’

2

The Most Dangerous Game

The kind of things she does.

Iris Mason-Stubbs had only a vague notion what they might be, these things. Nobody so far had actually put any of it into words. For some reason she thought of it in terms of an invasion. The invasion of the Home Counties by . . . by . . .

She frowned, her cup of coffee poised in mid-air. No, she couldn’t think by what. She had to admit she was a bit out of her depth. She had had no experience of such matters. One heard stories about girls like that, but of course it wasn’t the sort of thing that happened to people one knew. Certainly not to members of one’s family. To her own brother. It was awful – the stuff of nightmares – the kind of hideously lurid story that sold tabloid papers to hoi polloi. Well, not only to hoi polloi, sadly. Henry relished the rags – he said he found scandal ‘irresistible’ – he couldn’t help it, he said. Henry claimed to be the reincarnation of a roofer from Romford. So droll! (On no account must she tell Henry.)


APPEAL COURT JUDGE’S DAUGHTER TURNS –

No. She couldn’t say the word – not even in her mind. Well, the rags would make the most of any opportunity for sensationalism. But that’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? Yes. She wasn’t such a dim bulb after all. That’s what it was all about. No point in clinging to the hope it might turn out to be something completely different, because it wasn’t something completely different. Rather inconsequentially Iris remembered how her poor mother had once maintained that a gentlewoman’s name should appear in newspapers only twice: on her marriage and on her death.


Hitherto Toby and Lucasta had contrived to keep the situation under wraps, which was perfectly understandable – no one in their right mind went about broadcasting their dark personal secrets! It was the kind of embarrassing private drama that at any moment might explode into an even more embarrassing public one. Toby wouldn’t be left alone if the tabloids were ever to get a whiff of any of it.

Her brother had already been in the news. He had made certain public statements – ‘pronouncements’, the liberal press had called them – concerning some of his bugbears: single mothers, immigrants, the Archbishop of Canterbury and his beard, queers in the army, state schools. Not surprisingly, the liberal press had taken against him. The liberal press would have a field day – oh, how they would gloat – if only they were to learn of Toby’s predicament!

It occurred to Iris that she wouldn’t be immune either. If she were to be identified as Toby’s sister – as the ‘aunt’ – they would think her worthy of their attention. News reporters and suchlike would besiege their house and they’d keep ringing the bell. They’d bang on her front door and shout impertinent questions through the flap and demand interviews. They’d flash their cameras. It would drive the dogs potty! (Columba and Tailwagger became frantic each time someone rang the front door bell.) Henry might actually get it into his head to go out and talk to them. Henry would probably think the whole thing a hoot. How are the mighty fallen. Henry was bound to say something like that. He and Toby didn’t get on. Toby liked to refer to his brother-in-law as ‘that buffoon’.


She asked where exactly her niece was at the moment.

‘Well, she was in Dubai to start with, that’s in the United Emirates, then in Bahrain, but since last month she’s been in Goa.’

‘Go-ah? Where exactly is Go-ah?’

‘South India. On the Arabian Sea coast. She is at a place called Kilhar.’

‘Killer?’


‘Kil-har. Ghastly place, by the sound of it. Toby looked it up on the map. He’s got two maps on the wall in his study – one of the world, which he’s covered with stars and dates for the places she’s been to – the other of Goa, Doesn’t allow me to go anywhere near them. He’s like a general conducting some military campaign!’ Lucasta gave a mirthless laugh. ‘He’s marked Goa with a red flag.’


Red for danger. ‘Killer’.’Kill her’. Either association was extremely unpleasant. Iris thought: Toby is obsessed with his daughter and Lucasta is obsessed with Toby. Nothing good can come of it.

‘He’s got someone spying on her.’

Iris sat forward alertly in her chair. ‘Not a – policeman?’

‘A policeman, yes. A retired one. A man called Bishop – no, Knight – some such name. He’s English. He’s lived in Goa for years, apparently. Knight tails her, writes everything down, then reports his findings to Toby. Toby spends hours on the phone, talking to him. You should see our phone bill. Oh, Iris, that’s not how I imagined our lives would be! This is complete madness. Toby doesn’t deserve any of it!’


‘Of course he doesn’t. Oh, my dear, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. Such a pretty girl too. Who’d have thought it? Well, Toby didn’t like her doing modelling. Isn’t that when the whole trouble started?’

‘Toby disapproved of the company she started keeping while she was modelling.’


In search of high-octane thrills. Henry had used that expression once – apropos of something completely different. Oh, how Henry would enjoy this!


‘She met some man, didn’t she? Some – foreigner?’ Iris peered into her cup. ‘She said he was one of her “sponsors”, I remember, but of course it turned out he was something completely different – or have I got the wrong end of the stick?’

‘The man was an Arab. He was an escort agency owner. Terribly rich.’ Lucasta spoke in measured tones. ‘He was the head of an international escort agency. Branches in London, Paris, Shanghai, Bahrain and so on. He made her an offer, apparently, which she accepted. All that came out later on, mind. Sorry, Iris. I am a bad hostess. Would you like some more coffee?’

‘Yes, please.’

Lucasta picked up the pot with a steady hand. ‘Toby learnt the exact nature of what was going on entirely by chance. The exact nature of – of what she did. It came to him as a bolt out of the blue. He happened to open her diary, you see. Quite by chance. Oh well, you might as well know the whole story. He saw names – dates – a record of the payments she’d been receiving – instructions – addresses.’


‘Instructions?’ At once Iris wished she had held her tongue.

The redness on Lucasta’s cheeks intensified and her lips pressed tighter. ‘Instructions from clients. Concerning their . . . particular . . . tastes. Lists of outfits and – objects – paraphernalia – even lines of dialogue. He confronted her at once, asked for an explanation. She accused him of snooping. She was terribly rude to him. At first she prevaricated, told him it was none of his business, but then she came out with it. She looked Toby in the eye and told hi. . .