The Silver Castle by Nancy Buckingham

blame him.”
    “Blame him for what?”
    Raimund lifted an eyebrow at me. “Now that, Gail, would be telling.”
    Quite suddenly I’d had enough. I was determined to make him talk.
    “It’s high time you did tell me, Raimund, so out with it. What’s this mystery all about? Why did Anton become so hostile when he discovered who I was?”
    “If you are so anxious to find out,” he said, forcing a weak smile, “you’d better ask him yourself.”
    “I’m asking you.”
    He was silent, absently tracing with his finger the outline of the wine stain. At last he said in barely more than a whisper, “You’ll wish to God you didn’t know.”
    My voice was firm as rock, but my heart was fluttering.
    “Tell me.”
    He raised his eyes and looked at me. They were not the gaily dancing eyes of Raimund any more, but the grave grey eyes of Anton. Eyes that found little in this world to laugh about.
    “That woman your father was with, Gail ...”
    I had to prompt him, even now. “What about her?”
    ‘It was Valencienne.”
    “Valencienne? Who was she?”
    His hand slid off the table and dropped inertly into his lap.
    “She was Anton’s wife.”
     
     

Chapter Six
     
    Raimund was silent in the seat beside me, plunged deep in gloom. I drove his Mercedes gingerly, never having handled so powerful a car before. The unfamiliar roads, the darkness, the steadily falling rain all added up to a nearly intolerable strain. And every moment, howling in my brain, was this new knowledge ... the woman who had died with my father was Anton Kreuder’s wife.
    Before we left the hotel I had pressed Raimund for more details, but after that one shocking revelation he had clammed up completely. He’d just sat there staring at me owlishly, half-scared, I believed, of what the effect would be on me, yet in a perverse sort of way enjoying the moment of drama.
    Outside, he had walked so unsteadily that I’d protested, “You’re not fit to drive, Raimund. You’d better let me do it.”
    “I’m all right.”
    “It’s patently obvious that you’re not. And I don’t see why you should risk my life as well as your own. So stop arguing and give me your keys.”
    We had been on the road now for over an hour. Sick at heart, I tried desperately to marshal what facts I knew into some kind of credible pattern. The biggest hurdle to my understanding was why Valencienne Kreuder should ever have started a love affair with an impoverished, middle-aged artist, when she was married to a wealthy and attractive man like Anton. It made no sense, no sort of sense at all.
    I could only suppose that my father had possessed, as some men do, an almost hypnotic power to captivate women. Sigrid Kreuder had fallen under his spell, and remained so even now that he was dead ... though in her case it emerged as a passionate veneration of the artist, not a passionate love for the man. Had he, over Valencienne Kreuder, cast a spell so potent that he could even persuade her into the insanity of a double suicide? Yet if this were so, what insoluble problem could possibly have faced them which required such a despairing act? Or had it been, as Raimund had hinted, no more than the dramatic gesture of an embittered man? I refused to believe that.
    Fortunately there was little traffic, but at one point a car came sweeping around a bend towards us in the centre of the road. Its headlights dazzled me and, in swerving, I caught the grass verge before I could get my bearings again.
    “Bloody maniac.” Raimund jerked himself upright. “You should have flashed him. He could easily have put us over the edge.”
    He seemed to have sobered up by now, but I didn’t feel in any mood to talk. Presently, he said, “What are you going to do, now that I have told you about Valencienne?”
    “How can I say what I’m going to do? I feel a bit desperate ... only knowing half the story like this. Everybody has been ganging up to stop me discovering the truth. But I’m determined to