Ancestral Vices

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘Shock’s probably hit her badly,’ said the Brigadier-General when she had left the room. In his way he was right. The shock of discovering that the family she had protected for so long could desert her, and were in fact a collection of craven cowards, had changed Emmelia’s outlook entirely. She lay in bed listening to the murmur of voices from the room below and for the first time found some sympathy for Ronald. It was exceedingly little and consisted more of a shared contempt for the rest of the family, but in the scales of her mind it tipped the balance. They could deal with the problem themselves. She had played her part and from now on they must play their own.

  *

  And so for the moment they did. Towards eleven Frederick arrived with the comforting information that Yapp’s statement, as relayed to him by Sergeant Richey, whose wife was in charge of plastic underwear, contained no reference to the Mill other than that it was undoubtedly a sweat-shop.

  ‘You don’t think he’s making an oblique reference to those chamois-lined camiknickers?’ asked Mrs Van der Fleet-Petrefact, who had taken a secret liking to the garments. ‘One would undoubtedly perspire rather profusely . . .’

  ‘Or the thermal agitator perhaps?’ suggested her husband.

  The Judge looked at Frederick with undisguised disgust. He was wondering if the brute was wearing a merkin. ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Frederick, ‘I mean his solicitor’s been to see him and he’d have mentioned something about it if Yapp did know.’

  ‘True,’ said the Judge. ‘And what is the name of his solicitor?’

  ‘Rubicond, I think, though I don’t see what that has to do with the case.’

  ‘Never mind what you don’t see. The legal profession is a brotherhood and a word dropped . . .’ The Judge sipped his port thoughtfully. ‘Well, we must just hope for the best and let Justice take its natural course.’

  *

  And Justice, of a sort, did. On Monday Yapp was brought before Osbert Petrefact in his guise as chief magistrate and two minutes later had been remanded in custody without bail. On Tuesday Judge Petrefact, in passing sentence on a school caretaker for indecently assaulting two teenagers he hadn’t, gave it as his considered opinion that acts of violence against minors and small persons such as dwarves must be stamped out before the Rule of Law collapsed entirely. The caretaker went down for ten years.

  But it was in Lord Petrefact’s newspapers that Yapp was most fiercely, if anonymously, condemned. Each carried an editorial pointing out that dwarves were an endangered species, a minority group whose interests were not adequately catered for or, in the case of his most respectable paper, The Warden, that Persons of Restricted Growth deserved better of a supposedly caring and concerned society than to be treated as ordinary men and women and ought accordingly to have shorter working hours and disability pensions. By Thursday even the Prime Minister had been questioned on the human rights of dwarves and Common Market regulations in regard to the grading of individuals according to size, while a Liberal backbencher had threatened to introduce a Private Member’s Bill guaranteeing proportional accommodation on public transport and in all places of entertainment.

  In short the presumption that Willy Coppett had been murdered by Professor Yapp had been firmly implanted in the public mind to such an extent that a protest march of dwarves demanding protection against assaults by Persons of Excessive Growth was seen on television proving the contrary of their case by routing a police contingent sent to prevent them from clashing with a large body of women campaigning for Abortion For Dwarves. In the ensuing mêlée several women had miscarriages and one teenage dwarf, having been disentangled from beneath the skirt of an extremely pregnant woman, was rushed to hospital as a premature baby.

  Nor was that all. Behind these televised scenes more sinister moves were being made to discredit Walden Yapp and to ensure that his trial was as short as possible, his conviction certain, his sentence long, and that his evidence contained no mention of the Petrefact family. By that evidently telepathic influence which so informs the English legal system, Purbeck Petrefact remotely controlled Sir Creighton Hore, QC, who had been briefed by Mr Rubicond. The eminent counsel honourably refused the offer of a judgeship, but took the hint. In any case he had already decided it would be an act of legal folly to allow Yapp to be cross-examined in the witness box.

  ‘The man’s clearly as mad as a hatter and the case of Regina versus Thorpe and others establishes sufficient precedent.’

  ‘But can’t we simply plead insanity?’ asked Mr Rubicond.

  ‘We could, but unfortunately Broadmoor’s taking the case and he’s not given to accepting any proof less than the McNaghten Rules.’

  ‘But they went out years ago.’

  ‘My dear fellow, you don’t have to tell me. Unfortunately Lord Broadmoor, for whatever reasons – and one must suppose they’re largely personal – has yet to accept a plea of guilty but insane. We’ll be lucky to get your client off with life imprisonment.’

  ‘It’s extraordinary that Broadmoor’s been given the case,’ said Mr Rubicond naively. Sir Creighton Hore kept his own counsel.

  The ripples of influence spread wider still. Even at Kloone University, where Yapp had once been so popular, his predicament aroused little sympathy, and that little was promptly quenched by a surprisingly large endowment from the Petrefact Foundation which created two new professors and the building of the William Coppett Hostel for Micropersons. Only two former colleagues made feeble attempts to visit him but he was too dejected to see anyone from the world that had discarded him.

  Besides, he was already succumbing to the lure of a new doctrine: that of martyrdom. The word itself had honourable antecedents, but better still it protected him from the terrifying notion that he was no more than the victim of a mistake. Anything was better than that, and if he were to allow himself to be seduced by the random and chaotic nature of existence he would lose the assurance, fostered so carefully over the years, that history was imbued with purpose and that the happiness of mankind was ultimately guaranteed. Once he admitted the opposite he would be in real danger of taking Mr Rubicond’s advice quite literally and going insane. Instead he repeated his belief that he had been framed and adjusted his outlook accordingly.

  ‘But I want to be cross-examined,’ he protested when the solicitor explained that he was not to go into the witness box, ‘it will allow me to tell the truth.’

  ‘And does the truth differ in any way from the signed statement you made to the police?’ asked Mr Rubicond.

  ‘No,’ said Yapp.

  ‘In that case it will be placed before the judge and jury without your having to make it any worse for yourself. Of course, if you’re determined to get forty years instead of a purely nominal life sentence I can’t stop you. Lord Broadmoor’s been waiting for a chance to hand out the longest term of imprisonment ever awarded in this country and if you give evidence it’s my opinion he’ll jump at the opportunity. Are you quite sure you wouldn’t rather plead guilty and get it over with quickly?’

  But Yapp had stuck to his innocence and the certainty that he was the victim of a conspiracy by the capitalist Petrefacts.

  ‘Anyway, you’ll get a chance to say a few words when the jury return with their verdict,’ said Mr Rubicond gloomily. ‘Though if you take my advice you’ll keep quiet. Lord Broadmoor’s hot on contempt and he might add a few more years to your sentence.’

  ‘History will vindicate me,’ said Yapp.

  ‘Which is more than can be said for the jury. Mrs Coppett is going to make the most ghastly impression on them and from what I’ve been able to glean she’s already confessed to adultery.’

  ‘Adultery? With me? But she can’t have. It’s absolutely untrue and in any case I very much doubt if she knows the meaning of the word.’

  ‘But the jury will,’ said Mr Rubicond. ‘And those mutilated corsets aren’t going to do our case any good. Broadmoor’s bound to draw the attention of the jury
to them. Not that they need much emphasis. The disgusting things speak for themselves.’

  Yapp lapsed into a mournful silence in which, with his usual goodheartedness, he compared his lot with that of poor Rosie and came to the conclusion that he was only marginally worse off.

  ‘Without Willy to look after she must be at her wits’ end,’ he said finally.

  ‘Depends where her wits begin,’ said Mr Rubicond, who still found it incomprehensible that a man of Yapp’s education and standing could, as he had admitted to the police, find anything remotely attractive in the mentally deficient wife of a dwarf. It was the strongest factor in leading him to suppose that his client was both guilty and insane. ‘Anyway, I gather she’s found a post with Miss Petrefact and is being well cared for, if that’s any consolation to you.’

  It wasn’t. Yapp returned to his cell now doubly convinced he had been framed. Two days later he dismissed Mr Rubicond and Sir Creighton Hore, and announced that he intended to conduct his own defence.

  24

  But if everything seemed to be moving Yapp towards his doom, one person was increasingly convinced of his innocence. Ever since Rosie Coppett had moved from Rabbitry Road and had pinned her all-in wrestlers and a great many bunnies to the sloping walls of her attic bedroom in the New House, Emmelia had questioned her almost daily on the events before and after Willy’s death. And with each new telling – she had once laced Rosie’s cocoa with whisky – Emmelia had been confirmed in her belief that, whoever had killed Willy, it wasn’t Yapp.

  She had arrived at this conclusion on two grounds; partly because, having shaken off the mantle of her own innocence, she was better able to discern it in others; and partly because everything in Rosie’s story which had so convinced the police that Yapp was guilty seemed to point her in the opposite direction. That Yapp should have harangued her in her own shrubbery on her iniquities as an employer of sweated labour while Willy’s body festered in the boot of the old Vauxhall argued an insane bravado or total innocence. Similarly, only a blithering idiot would have returned to the widow of a dwarf he had just murdered with the blood of his victim all over his hands and shirt and, while from brief acquaintance Emmelia was ready to concede that Yapp was both blithering and idiotic, he hadn’t struck her as a complete moron.

  In any case Rosie, in spite of the detailed instructions she had received from the police, steadfastly maintained that Yapp had never been to bed with her.

  ‘No, mum, he refused extras when I gave them to him,’ she said. It had taken Emmelia some time to find out what extras were and, when she had discovered where Rosie had picked up the term, had led to an acrimonious exchange on the telephone with the Marriage Advice Bureau on the evils of encouraging extramarital sex, as they put it, or, in Emmelia’s more forthright vocabulary, adultery. It was the same with every aspect of Rosie’s account. Yapp, for all his lowly origins and socialist opinions, had behaved like a gentleman – except apparently that he had gone off one night and battered Rosie’s husband to death. While Emmelia had known quite a number of so-called gentlemen who wouldn’t have hesitated to batter dwarves to death, Yapp didn’t come into their category. The man was an opinionated creature but he wasn’t a murderer. That was Emmelia’s conclusion and she stuck to it.

  Rosie stuck to the opposite view. It lent her life – and since the death of Willy she had felt doubly deprived – a glamour she had found previously only in the pages of her Confessions magazines, and it also pleased the policemen and lawyers who went over her evidence with her. By the day of the trial she had been so adequately programmed that she was almost prepared to swear she had killed Willy herself to keep them pleased, and when Inspector Garnet arrived to take her to the Court in Briskerton he was horrified to find her wearing her best.

  ‘Jesus wept,’ he said shading his eyes against a cerise dress, pink shoes and a boa she had been given by her mother who had got it in her turn from her grandmother. ‘She can’t go into court looking like that. It will throw Lord Broadmoor clean off course and he’ll send her down for soliciting.’

  ‘We can always find her something more suitable,’ said the policewoman who accompanied him.

  ‘I’d like to know where.’

  ‘There’s a Women’s Lib undertaker in Crag Street who has some hefty pall-bearers.’

  And so Rosie was driven to the mortician’s and fitted out in mourning dress. By the time she left she had all the hallmarks of a distraught widow while the proximity of so many coffins had affected her most movingly.

  ‘Willy’s was ever so tiny,’ she sobbed as she was helped into the room where the witnesses waited.

  *

  Meanwhile in the Court Emmelia was watching the course of the trial. Not that it could be accurately called a trial; Lord Broadmoor saw to that. Yapp’s declaration that he intended to conduct his own defence was in part responsible for the Judge’s attitude.

  ‘You intend to do what?’ he asked when Yapp first announced the fact.

  ‘Conduct my own defence,’ said Yapp. Lord Broadmoor peered at him narrowly.

  ‘Are you by any chance suggesting that the legal profession is incapable of providing you with the very best services a man in your position could possibly require?’

  ‘No, my decision has been taken on other grounds.’

  ‘Has it, by God? And my decision that you shall be handcuffed to a warder for the duration of this trial is taken on the grounds that I do not intend a murderer to escape from this courtroom. Warder, shackle this man.’

  While Yapp was bitterly contesting the presupposition that he was a murderer, he was handcuffed to the prison officer beside him.

  ‘You’ve got no right to call me a murderer,’ he shouted.

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Lord Broadmoor, ‘I stated that I did not intend to allow a murderer to escape from this courtroom. If you choose to call yourself a murderer I can’t stop you but in your circumstances I doubt if I would. The prosecution may now present its case.’

  In the third row of the public seats Emmelia hardly listened. She was studying the white-faced figure in the dock with the eyes of a woman who had, until recently, spent her entire life cosseted by an unshaken conscience and the certain belief that she was a good woman. Now that she was more nearly herself she could recognize her old symptoms in Yapp’s face. They were attenuated, of course, by lack of her enormous wealth and her knowledge that she would never be poor or unprotected, but his defiance and refusal to accept an unwarranted fate sprang from conviction. Yapp’s arrogance in the dock clinched his innocence for her.

  It did the opposite for Lord Broadmoor. As the trial progressed his unbiased disgust for the prisoner became more apparent and when Yapp tried to step from the dock to cross-examine Dr Dramble, the forensic expert, who had given evidence of the injuries inflicted on Willy Coppett, the Judge intervened: ‘And where do you think you’re going?’

  ‘I have a right to cross-examine this witness,’ said Yapp.

  ‘So you have,’ said the Judge, ‘indeed you have. No one doubts you have. I certainly don’t. But that was not the question I put to you. I asked “Where do you think you are going?” I repeat it.’

  ‘I am going to question this witness,’ said Yapp.

  Lord Broadmoor removed his spectacles and polished them. ‘I would cast some doubt upon your use of the word “going”,’ he said finally. ‘For the moment you are going nowhere. If you insist on putting questions to this expert witness you will do so from the dock. I am not prepared to have innocent prison officers dragged round the courtroom by the wrist for your amusement. You have caused enough trouble already.’

  And so the trial continued with Yapp shouting his questions from the dock and Lord Broadmoor ordering the prisoner not to make a noise or attempt to intimidate the witness, and all the time Emmelia sat watching in the knowledge that she was in some way responsible for what was happening. Perhaps not personally but at least as one of the Petrefacts whose enormous influence was so heavily wei
ghted against Yapp. In the past she had been protected from such knowledge by her seclusion and the folly of obscure grandeur. Her mirror-image in Cleete’s shop window and the family’s desertion had destroyed all that, and in its place she found herself identifying with the very man her brother had sent down to destroy the Petrefact reputation. It was all most peculiar and sickening, but when at the end of the first day she left the courtroom she was delighted to see Lord Petrefact being bounced very uncomfortably down the steps outside.

  ‘My dear Ronald,’ she said with that affectionate duplicity she found so easy now, ‘I didn’t see you among the spectators.’

  ‘Hardly fucking surprising since I wasn’t,’ snapped the old man, resorting to the language he expected to offend her. But Emmelia merely beamed at him.

  ‘How stupid of me. You’ve been called as a witness,’ she said as Croxley wheeled the chair towards the waiting hearse. ‘You know, I think Professor Yapp’s handling his case remarkably well.’

  Lord Petrefact made noises which seemed to signify that Professor Fucking Yapp could stuff his case where the fucking monkey stuffed the fucking nuts.

  ‘That’s four “fuckings”,’ said Emmelia sympathetically. ‘It leads one to suppose you’ve been having trouble with your prostate again.’

  ‘Never mind my fucking prostate,’ shouted Lord Petrefact.

  ‘Five,’ said Emmelia. ‘You know, if you start using that sort of language in the witness box it will make a very bad impression on the jury.’

  ‘Fuck the jury,’ said Lord Petrefact and was hoisted into the hearse.

  ‘And where are you staying?’

  ‘At Reginald Pouling’s.’

  ‘One of your tame MPs. Oh well, it must be a great comfort . . .’ But Lord Petrefact had given orders to the driver and the hearse left Emmelia standing on the pavement. She wandered thoughtfully along the street. At least Yapp had subpoenaed one of his enemies. Emmelia’s thoughts turned to other possible witnesses but without much hope. Why, for instance, hadn’t Yapp called her? He had come to see her with the body in the boot of the car . . . But then again he hadn’t seen her. He had supposed she was her own overworked, underpaid gardener. Well, she could soon rectify that mistake. She turned and marched back into the Courthouse and demanded of an official the right to see the accused. Since the man was a Gas Board meter reader it was some time before she discovered that Yapp was being held in Briskerton police station.