Ancestral Vices

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘Here,’ he muttered, ‘what are you doing?’

  ‘Eating,’ said Yapp through a mouthful of gelatine and colonic lubricant.

  ‘What the hell have you got to eat at this time of night?’ asked Watford, for whom the subject of ingestion was of perennial interest.

  ‘You can have one,’ said Yapp. ‘Where is your hand?’

  But Mr Watford knew better. ‘You can put it on the stool.’

  Watford took it cautiously.

  ‘What on earth is it?’ he asked after fingering the thing and failing to identify it.

  ‘If you don’t want it I’ll have it back,’ said Yapp. Watford hesitated. He was fond of eating things, but the experience of his victims suggested caution and the shape and texture of the pessary weren’t exactly inviting.

  ‘I think I’ll keep it for the morning, thank you very much.’

  ‘Oh no you don’t,’ foamed Yapp, ‘either you eat it now or I’ll have it back. I’m not wasting them. I’ve only two left.’

  Watford put the pessary hurriedly back on the stool. ‘I’d still like to know what they are,’ he said. Yapp grabbed the thing and made bubbling noises.

  ‘Dwarf’s balls,’ he mouthed. For a few seconds there was no sound from Watford as he fought to keep his supper down and then with a sickening yell he was out of bed and battering on the cell door with the wooden stool. As the other prisoners on the landing joined in the din, Yapp spat the remains of his munched pessary into the toilet, rinsed his mouth out and pulled the chain. He was lying peacefully in bed when the door opened and Watford hurled himself at the warders. This time he gave no explanation but, to ensure he was transferred to the safety of the punishment block, hit one warder over the head with the stool and bit the other.

  Yapp’s conversion to the Realpolitik of prison life had begun. It continued next morning. Summoned before the Governor to explain his part in turning the Bournemouth poisoner from a detested prisoner into a demented one, he gave it as his considered opinion that Watford’s illness, manifesting itself as it had done prior to his sojourn in Drampoole Prison in the covert and libidinously oriented attempt to surrogate to himself the paternal role vis-à-vis his mother by chemically eliminating the pseudo-persons of his father, had been environmentally aggravated to terminal paranoid-schizophrenia by prolonged incarceration and the absence of normal socio-sexual relationships.

  ‘Really?’ muttered the Governor, desperately struggling to preserve his authority in the face of this socio-jargonic onslaught. Yapp delivered several more extended opinions on the subject of indefinite imprisonment and the cabbage Gestalt before the Governor put his foot down and had him taken back to his cell.

  ‘Good God Almighty,’ he muttered to the Deputy Governor, ‘if I hadn’t heard that with my own ears I wouldn’t have believed it.’

  ‘And having heard it with mine, I don’t,’ said the Deputy, who had served in Northern Ireland and knew bullshit when it came his way. ‘Look at the brute’s background. He’s a political fanatic and a typical H-block troublemaker and before you can say Stormont he’ll have every other murderer in High Security smearing faeces all over the walls and demanding terrorist status.’

  ‘But this used to be such a nice quiet little prison,’ sighed the Governor looking sadly at a signed portrait of Pierrepoint he kept on his desk to remind him of happier days. ‘Anyway, we know what broke that ghastly little prisoner. Just imagine being locked in a cell with a man with a vocabulary like that.’

  Two days later the Governor made an urgent recommendation to the Home Office asking for Professor Yapp’s transfer to a Grade One Prison for First Term Offenders from the Professional and Educated Classes.

  26

  But it was elsewhere that Yapp’s future was being most profoundly decided. Emmelia’s first attack was made in the village of Mapperly where a diminutive Miss Ottram worked in the Post Office. The place was twenty miles from Buscott and Emmelia had reconnoitred it several times to discover her victim’s routine. Miss Ottram left home at one end of the village at a quarter-past eight every morning, walked to the Post Office at the other end, spent the day behind the counter and walked home again at five, presumably, as her letter to Frederick suggested, to tend her bottle garden. On the night of the attack Miss Ottram’s bottle garden went untended. As she was walking in a dark area between two street lamps a car door opened and a husky voice asked her the way to a house called Little Burn.

  ‘I don’t know anywhere called that,’ said Miss Ottram, ‘not round here.’

  There was a rustle of paper in the car. ‘It’s on the Pyvil road,’ said the voice. ‘Perhaps you could find Pyvil on my map.’

  Miss Ottram said she could and moved closer. A moment later a blanket had been thrown over her head and she was bundled into the car.

  ‘Stop making that noise or I’ll use the knife on you,’ said the voice as Miss Ottram’s muffled screams came from under the blanket. The screams stopped and her hands were manacled behind her back. The car then drove off, only to stop a mile further on. In the darkness Miss Ottram felt hands clasp her and then the voice spoke again.

  ‘Damn,’ it said, ‘too much traffic.’ And Miss Ottram was thrust out into the road still covered in the blanket while the car drove away at high speed. Half an hour later Miss Ottram was discovered by a passing motorist and taken to Briskerton police station where she told her terrible story with more graphic and inaccurate detail than it actually deserved.

  ‘He said he was going to rape you?’ asked Inspector Garnet.

  Miss Ottram nodded. ‘He said if I didn’t do what he told me he’d use the knife on me and then he handcuffed my hands behind my back.’

  The Inspector looked at the shackles the Fire Brigade had taken some considerable time to cut off. They were extremely strong and since they required the use of a key to lock them it was impossible that Miss Ottram had put them on herself.

  ‘I didn’t like the sound of that knife threat,’ said the Sergeant when she had finally been allowed to go home in a police car. ‘Puts me in mind of that murder we had . . .’

  ‘I’m aware of that,’ said the Inspector irritably, ‘but that Professor bastard’s inside. I’m more interested in this blanket.’

  They looked at the blanket carefully. ‘Cats’ hairs. An expensive blanket with cats’ hairs. That tells us something. We’ll have to see if Forensic can come up with any other detail indicators.’

  The Inspector went home and spent a troubled night.

  *

  At the New House Emmelia had difficulty getting to sleep too. It had been one thing to plan to molest dwarves but another thing altogether to put it into practice and she was worried about Miss Ottram. With the blanket over her head she might have been run over. Then again she had certainly been terrified. Emmelia weighed her terror against the life sentence passed on Yapp and tried to console herself that Miss Ottram’s horrible experience was partially justified.

  ‘After all, life in Mapperly must be very dull,’ she told herself, ‘and silly women who answer Lonely Hearts advertisements are asking for trouble. Anyway she’ll have something to talk about for the rest of her life.’

  Nevertheless when she struck again three nights later it was at a more mature and divorced dwarf called Mrs May Fossen who lived in a council house on the outskirts of Briskerton. Mrs Fossen was just putting her chihuahua out for its nocturnal pee when she was confronted by a masked figure wearing an overcoat from which protruded the biggest you-know-what she’d ever seen in her life.

  ‘It was gigantic,’ she told Inspector Garnet, ‘I wouldn’t have believed it possible to have such a big one. I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t had the presence of mind to slam the door in his face.’

  ‘And you say he was wearing a mask?’ said the Inspector, preferring not to speculate on the probable consequences of an enormous you-know-what being inserted into the person of even a divorced dwarf.

  ‘Yes, a horrible bla
ck shiny thing, but it was the you-know . . .’

  ‘Quite so. You were very sensible to slam the door and bolt it. Very sensible indeed. Now have you any recollection of seeing this knife?’

  He produced a large carving knife which had been found in the garden. Mrs Fossen shook her head.

  ‘Then we won’t keep you any longer. Two constables will drive you home and we’ll keep a guard on your house until this maniac is apprehended.’

  That night Emmelia had no trouble getting to sleep. She had achieved her object without having to resort to physical force and the carving knife must be giving the police something to think about.

  In this she was right. Next morning Inspector Garnet held a briefing session.

  ‘We’ve established three important facts about the man we’re looking for. Forensic have identified the cats that have slept on the blanket used in Miss Ottram’s case. Siamese, Burmese, a lot of tabbies and at least one Persian. Next the knife. It’s old and well-worn and has traces of dandelion root on it. Finally there are these handcuffs. Obviously they’re handmade and purpose-built by a craftsman in metalwork. Now if any of you can come up with information that will lead us to a cat-fancier and health-food addict who dabbles in ironwork in his spare time, we should be able to wrap this case up.’

  ‘I suppose it’s too much to ask if there were any fingerprints?’ said the Sergeant.

  ‘Only smudges. Anyway he’d have to be an idiot to go out on a job without gloves in these enlightened days.’

  ‘Only a raving lunatic would go around trying to rape dwarves,’ said the Sergeant, ‘especially with a penis the size of a small tree-trunk the way that Mrs Fossen described it.’

  Inspector Garnet looked at him pityingly. ‘I shouldn’t take too much notice of what she says. I mean anyone her stature is going to find a normal penis enormous. It’s all a question of relativity and perspective. If you were knee-high to a dachshund you’d think a pencil was a whopper.’

  For several days the police visited local catteries, took the names of customers of two health-food shops and interviewed them, and grilled the employees of several wrought-iron works. Their investigations led them nowhere and forced Emmelia to act with the ferocious desperation she had hoped to avoid.

  Her victim this time was a Miss Consuelo Smith, whose reply to Frederick’s advert suggested she was a dwarf of easy virtue. It had not mentioned that she was also a Black Belt dwarf. It was left to Emmelia to discover this disconcerting fact when, having phoned Miss Smith and pretended to be the Gentleman of Restricted Growth of the agony column, they met at a rendezvous outside the Memorial Hall in Lower Busby. As the secondhand Ford drew alongside and Emmelia opened the door Miss Smith hopped nimbly into the seat before realizing she had evidently entered the wrong car.

  ‘Here, where do you think you’re going?’ she shouted as Emmelia accelerated. ‘You’re not a fucking dwarf. You’re a ruddy norm.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Emmelia hoarsely, finding some difficulty in accepting the term, ‘but I’m very fond of little people.’

  ‘Well, I’m buggered if I’m going to have a colossus fondling me, so stop the car,’ screamed Miss Consuelo. Emmelia groped for her knife.

  ‘You’ll do what I say or I’ll stick you like I did the other one,’ she said and was promptly proved wrong. With one hand Miss Consuelo chopped the knife onto the car floor and with the other delivered a rabbit punch to Emmelia’s Adam’s apple which left her speechless and gasping for breath. As she struggled to control the car Miss Consuelo employed more drastic tactics and tried to get her hands on her abductor’s scrotum. Instead she hit the dildo. Unlike Mrs Fossen, Consuelo was not awed by its size. On the contrary she considered it a distinct advantage and with all the experience of a truly demi-mondaine hurled herself at it and sank her teeth into the thing. To her consternation Emmelia did not scream in agony but pulled the car into the side of the road.

  ‘All right, you can get out now,’ she said, finally finding her voice, but Consuelo hung on with a tenacity that sprang from a new fear. A man who could speak with even comparative calm while having his glans penis bitten to the quick was either a masochist to end all masochists or a creature of such phenomenal self-control that she was taking no chances. For a fraction of a second she opened her mouth and then bit again even harder. But Emmelia had had enough. Leaning over, she opened the side door and hurled Consuelo out into the ditch, slammed the door shut and drove off.

  Consuelo sat in the ditch and stared after the retreating tail lights before realizing that she still had something in her mouth. With a natural revulsion she spat it out and gave vent to her feelings.

  Ten minutes later, in a state of hysterical horror at what she had done, she stumbled across the threshold of the policeman’s house at Lower Busby and presently was washing her mouth out with neat disinfectant while trying at intervals to explain what had happened.

  ‘You mean to say you bit the top of the bastard’s prick off and he didn’t even squeak?’ said the Constable and promptly developed what amounted to lockjaw of the thighs.

  ‘What do you think I keep telling you?’ mumbled Consuelo.

  ‘But what was it doing there in the first place. You say this man picked you up and tried to assault you—’

  ‘I didn’t give the sod a chance,’ spluttered Consuelo. ‘I chopped him one across the gizzard and then because he had this erection I bit the beastly thing and the top bit was still there when I fought my way out of the car.’

  ‘Still where?’

  ‘Between my teeth, stupid.’ Consuelo washed her mouth out again. ‘I spat it out and ran here.’

  The policeman blanched and crossed his legs still tighter. ‘Well, all I can say is that there’s some poor bugger out there who must be wishing to hell he hadn’t met up with you. Must be bleeding to death by now. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  Consuelo Smith bridled. ‘I like that,’ she said bitterly. ‘Talk about a man’s fucking world and a norm’s at that. I bet if I’d been raped and murdered you wouldn’t feel so sorry for me. But just because I bit—’

  ‘All right, all right. I agree. It’s just that . . .’

  ‘It happened to be a male norm,’ continued Consuelo, only to be confounded later when Inspector Garnet arrived with a search party and discovered the tip of the dildo.

  ‘Fuck me,’ he said angrily staring down at the thing. ‘Just when it seemed certain the swine couldn’t strike again and all we’d got to do was to go round the hospitals and pick up the first bloke without the end of his prick, what do we find? An artificial one. And what does that tell us?’

  ‘That the bastard knew his onions when dealing with that human rat-trap,’ said the Constable, who was still having difficulty walking properly.

  ‘Balls,’ said the Inspector, adding to the Constable’s trauma. ‘It doesn’t need a shrink to tell us that our man is impotent and so sexually inadequate he can’t cope with a proper woman.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it that way in front of Consuelo. She doesn’t take kindly to—’

  It was the Inspector’s turn to squirm. ‘Kindly?’ he shouted. ‘Having seen what she can do to a cross between a radial tyre and a penis I wouldn’t dream of putting my private parts anywhere near the bitch.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I mean about her not being a proper woman. She’s a Dwarf Libber. She talks about male norms.’

  ‘She can talk about them till she’s blue in the face but what she’s done to this thing’s not normal, not by a long chalk.’

  They went back to the station and confronted Consuelo with the new evidence.

  ‘You needn’t worry, Miss Smith,’ said the Inspector, ‘you can’t possibly have caught anything . . .’

  But Consuelo wasn’t listening. Her attention was fixed on the plastic glans penis. ‘I knew there was something strange,’ she said. ‘No wonder it didn’t scream blue murder.’

  ‘“It” being the operative word, said the Inspector.
‘We’re evidently dealing with a sexual psychopath who can’t get it up and—’

  ‘Rubbish,’ interrupted Consuelo, ‘you’re dealing with a woman.’ Inspector Garnet smiled sympathetically. ‘Of course we are, Miss Smith. And a woman of considerable spirit too, if I may say so.’

  ‘Not me, dummy. The person who attacked me was a woman. I should have known that. When she first spoke it was with a deep voice but at the end it was pitched several octaves higher.’

  ‘That’s understandable after what you’d . . .’

  ‘Bright-eyes,’ said Consuelo contemptuously, ‘this is a false one, remember? Which is why she didn’t scream.’

  The Inspector sank despondently into a chair. ‘You’re quite certain it was a woman.’

  ‘Absolutely. And what’s more she had a la-di-da voice like she was talking down to you.’

  ‘Yes, well all things considered I daresay she . . .’ began the Inspector before being quelled by the look in her eyes. ‘Right, so now all we’ve got to find is an upper-class lesbian who keeps cats, has lost a carving knife and the top half of a surrogate penis, and is a dab hand at making handcuffs. There can’t be many such women around.’

  ‘She also drives a Cortina, is five foot five, weighs about 140 pounds and has a sore left wrist.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Miss Smith. You’ve been extremely helpful, and now a police car will take you home. If we require any further information from you—’

  ‘Blimey,’ interrupted Consuelo, ‘if this is the way the fuzz works it’s no bleeding wonder there’s so much crime around. Don’t you even want to know how it was I got into that car? You don’t think I go around getting into strange cars in the middle of the night without a bloody good reason, or do you? I may not be half your size but I reckon my head’s got more brains in it than you pack under your helmet.’