Assassins at Ospreys

Assassins at Ospreys by R. T. Raichev

Book: Assassins at Ospreys by R. T. Raichev Read Free Book Online
Authors: R. T. Raichev
Ads: Link
quite say why . . .
    Father Lillie-Lysander shut his eyes and a little moan escaped his lips. He had had a vision of two meteors of living flame colliding and fusing into one enormous golden ball of fire . Was that it? Was it – starting ?
    He sat in his study, cross-legged, swathed in a rather sumptuous apple-green dressing gown with frogged lapels. On the round table by his side was a glass of Chartreuse, also apple-green in colour, which every now and then he raised to his lips. Not many people drank Chartreuse these days, but Father Lillie-Lysander was not like other people. He prided himself on being, in a great number of ways, unique.
    Next to the glass with the Chartreuse lay his round, silver-framed reading glasses and a syringe. A minute earlier he had injected himself with morphine – he had stolen the ampoule from Ralph Renshawe’s bedside table – and was waiting for it to take effect.
    Papaver somniferum . Juice of poppies. Three grains would be fatal, but he was taking a ‘recreational’ dose. Like the opium eaters in the nineteenth century. Being of an obsessive mind, Lillie-Lysander had read all about it. On the floor beside his chair lay that month’s bank statement, where he had dropped it, also a letter from his bank manager. He had expected some such development. He was overdrawn. It was the second time in six months.
    The week before he had won five thousand pounds at the Midas, the privately run casino situated in London’s Park Lane – only to lose it, again at the Midas, some forty-five minutes later. The Midas was Father Lillie-Lysander’s secret haunt. He went there every Friday night, wearing a dinner jacket, a red carnation in his buttonhole, and a false moustache. He had a penchant for the absurdly histrionic, for high-camp masquerades, for subterfuge and noms de plume , for mind games and twilight dealings. Ambiguities of every kind delighted him. At the casino he was known as ‘Lushington’, which, as it happened, was his mother’s maiden name. (At school, inevitably, he had been known as ‘Lily’.)
    He had bumped into Robin Renshawe two months previously at one of the gaming tables at the Midas. The two hadn’t met since their schooldays. At Antleforth – or ‘Antlers’, as Robin kept calling it – Robin had enjoyed universal adulation thanks to his languid good looks, sporting prowess and dangerous kind of wit – also for the skill with which he could tear a pack of cards in two.
    They hadn’t been friends to start with; if anything, Lillie-Lysander had been a little afraid of Robin, but they had discovered common ground in their love for the theatre. They had appeared in every school play together. Contrary to expectations and much to his classmates’ dis-appointment, Lillie-Lysander had refused to play women’s roles, plumping instead for the slippered pantaloon/ stuffed shirt character part. He had raised great laughs as Pooh-Bah and Polonius while Robin had been Nanki-Poo and Hamlet. Then they had appeared in The Master Cracksman – he had been a somewhat plump Bunny to Robin’s dashing Raffles. And finally, in their last year, Robin had played an exceedingly sinister Mephistopheles to his susceptible Dr Faustus.
    ‘I always knew you had a weakness for heavy betting,’ Robin had said, a smile on his thin handsome face, and it felt as though they had parted only the other day. ‘Or are you here to deliver the last rites to a fellow member who is about to blow his brains out? I did hear the ugly rumour that you’d become a priest – it’s not true, is it?’
    ‘It is true.’
    ‘Like Father Canteloupe!’ Robin gasped in mock-horror and covered his eyes. ‘Remember Father Canteloupe?’
    ‘Nothing like Father Canteloupe.’
    ‘Chaps here do get desperate, if only occasionally – not as much as in Monte, where at one time apparently they could never tell if the popping sounds were gunshots or produced by the uncorking of champagne bottles. The terrace at

Similar Books

Emancipating Andie

Priscilla Glenn

Fathers and Sons

Richard Madeley

Cows

Matthew Stokoe

BorntobeWild

Lynne Connolly

The Wall

Jeff Long

A Different Sky

Meira Chand

The Sisters

Nadine Matheson

The Warrior Laird

Margo Maguire

Gods and Monsters

Felicia Jedlicka