“Did anyone think of putting a seal on the door?” said Pibble.
“The General wanted to,” said Mr. Singleton, “but Sergeant Thing was shocked by the idea, and we had no wish to offend him. He did the fingerprinting and I took the photographs for him, which came out excellently though I say it myself. They were all mine and Deakin’s. I have the proofs in my desk.”
He was still whispering, though they must have been out of earshot of the lion-fancying Admiral; Pibble wondered whether it could have been a curious decency toward the dead which Mr. Singleton would never have manifested if the coxswain had been living, bowing, and scraping flesh. That, too, seemed improbable.
There was really nothing to look at: the cupboards were full of neatly arranged paints, glues, glass jars containing nails and screws, boxes of carefully sorted miscellanea, boxes of taps and dies, plugs and sockets, electric cords in various gauges, and so on. There was nothing conceivably personal, no reading matter or diary or family photographs, but there was a pad and pencil with which the suicide could have written his long farewell. Pibble held the pad sideways to the light and found the impression of the previous sheet still visible—a diagram and a set of figures, such as a man jots down when he is fitting a set of shelves into an alcove.
The noose on the workbench was as tidily made as the model beside it, with a proper hangman’s knot to catch you under the corner of your jaw when your momentum—thirty-two feet per sec. per sec.—would jerk your head sideways and snap the vertebrae as finally as a chef breaking an egg. Pibble measured the distances with his eye: Deakin had been a little man, a runt; the stool was two feet six; he must have calculated things nicely to give himself the maximum drop, and finished with his toes a bare inch from the ground.
“You said something about a drumming noise,” said Pibble.
“Yes,” said Mr. Singleton. “I think he might have kicked out against that cupboard door, though that’s only my own opinion.”
Perhaps, but why worry? A suicide is a suicide, whatever noises he makes in his last six seconds.
Deakin’s bedroom was even bleaker than his pantry; bed, upright chairs, chairs, satinwood cupboard, and chest of drawers full of carefully mended clothes of coarse quality, tin trunk containing much-mothballed uniforms, no books, no papers. Only on the small, bare table was there any sign of a personality, and that was not Deakin’s: in a tooled blue morocco frame, almost three feet high, stood a signed photograph of Sir Richard Clavering riding in the Coronation procession. The old hero looked magnificent, small on his enormous horse, but as easy in his saddle as a border thief (he’d probably ridden to hounds since he was five, after all), withdrawn but assured, the embodiment of all that the Clavering myth meant to the English. The likeness between the brothers seemed much more noticeable in this picture than it had in the one in Pibble’s file, despite the Admiral’s clean-shaven lips and clipped eyebrows. But, subtly, the difference seemed stronger, too: here was none of the suggestion of the jockey, so noticeable in the General; the assuredness was far from breezy; Pibble was certain that the Admiral’s walk would be entirely different from Sir Ralph’s gazelle-like strut.
“Seen enough?” said Mr. Singleton sharply, from the door. “It will take us three and a half minutes to walk down to the Kitchen Wing and one and a half to come back. Kirtle should be here in ten minutes, which will leave you five to inspect the body. I have no wish to hurry you, of course.”
They walked in silence down the stairs and along the colonnade under the scented muscats.
The Main Block was a different world, an air almost too grandiose to breathe: first a vast, chill salon, a perfect cube frilled with gilt plaster but mitigated by a deep-arched alcove which enshrined the scandalous Zoffany (nothing like as lubricious as Pibble had been led to expect); next the prodigious vaulted hall, which made the salon seem like a broom cupboard by its size, and out of which the marble stairs, frothing with statuary, swept upward. Here like a plump ghost with no one to haunt, mooned Mr. Waugh.
“All well?” said Mr. Singleton.
“To the best of my knowledge, sir,” said Mr. Waugh. “The foreign visitors seemed both impressed and satisfied.”
“Good,” said Mr. Singleton. “I will take Superintendent Pibble down to the Kitchen Wing, and then I will come back and have a word with you.”
Mr. Waugh bowed, a barely perceptible waggle of acquiescence, and they walked on across the furlong of polished oak. Mr. Singleton wore Hush Puppies which went squeak-squeak on the shiny surface, and Pibble’s honest leather answered with a plebeian clack-clack. Beyond the hall, entered through a grape-swagged pair of fifteen-foot doors, was the Chinese Withdrawing Room, a double cube this time; in the remote corner the last knot of a batch of tourists was being sucked out of another pair of doors, slaves to Mr. Singleton’s implacable schedule.
“The Americans must appreciate the warmth,” said Pibble. “I don’t see any radiators.”
He looked around the monster collection of conversation bait: armor and weapons from every century; glass display cases full of documents and medals and curios; fine furniture enough to glut Sotheby’s; and, gloaming down upon the bric-a-brac, the generations of Claverings, from the stiff yellow-and-black pre-Holbein portraits, through Vandyke and Reynolds and Romney and Sargent and Birley, to the General’s practical-joke portrait by Dali and Epstein’s genial bronze bust of the Admiral.
“We keep this room at seventy-two,” said Mr. Singleton, not pausing in his stride. “I confess I was lucky in this case. Old Josiah had lived half his life in India and did not mind what he paid to be warm, so he installed a primitive hypocaust, which I simply adapted for oil. This way.”
The other colonnade was also run as a greenhouse, but with a difference; the heavy smell, near to rottenness, of the muscats was missing, and so were the plants put out to wither; everything here was for display, and it must have needed another large greenhouse to keep this one stocked. An old man with a spade beard, his face hidden beneath a droop-brimmed hat, his trousers tied with string below the knee, was spraying an arrangement of ferns; he touched his hat as they passed, but did not look up. The doors at the far end led directly into the kitchen, a big plain room with deal tables and settles filling two-thirds of it. A big, plain woman was counting slabs of steak onto a butcher’s block beside a bed of glowing charcoal.
“That looks good,” said Pibble.
“It has to be,” said Mr. Singleton. “Americans understand about meat.”
There was a stone passage on the far side of the kitchen, with little round-topped doors opening off on the right every few feet; Mr. Singleton unlocked the fourth and Pibble followed him in. It was like stepping out of mellow October into black frost.
“There he is,” said Mr. Singleton. “If you have finished before I come to fetch you, perhaps you would be kind enough to wait in the Chinese Room. The light switches are here. I will shut the door to keep the cold in. It opens from the inside.”
“Fine,” said Pibble. The door, thick as a strong-room hatch with insulation, swung shut with a breathy plup. He was entombed with the suicidal coxswain.
The light was garish. The dead man lay on a marble shelf, his eyes shut, the contours of his face (such of them as were visible through a Sealyham-like sprouting of white whiskers) relaxed into the strong lineaments of death. Pibble hated bodies; it wasn’t squeamishness, but a sense of intrusion into a particularly bleak intimacy, and the facial changes always added to this feeling. With the disappearance of the shifting minute-by-minute animation of the moving blood, you saw the real, enduring character emerge in coarse lines like a caricature. The mouths harshened; the bones of the nose declared their nature; the intricate patterning of wrinkles resolved into a bold, interpretable ideogram.
Deakin’s dogginess had resided not only in his whiskers; all his features were small and sharp, like a terrier’s. The grisly process of hanging h
ad even cocked his head inquiringly to one side, as though his last thought on earth had been a desire that someone should throw a stick for him. The contents of his pockets lay in a neat pile above his head, banal and uninformative. His shoes were old but glossy with ten thousand polishings. His hands were square and calloused, and in a cracked nail was a thread of what might have been hemp from the rope he used to hang himself.
Pibble stared at the waxy face and tried to imagine Mr. Singleton applying the kiss of life through all that hair. The chill made him feel detached, ruminative, just as the mild warmth through his carriage window had earlier that morning.
I am being conned, he thought. I am a tiny figure in some larger drama of theirs, simply here to be gulled and sent home, more momentary and peripheral even than loyal old Deakin. I must do my duty by God and the Claverings, certify this suicide, touch my cap, and depart. Anyway, it is a certifiable suicide, not quite unfakable but as near as makes no difference. You’d have to make him unconscious, lift him with the noose round his neck almost to the ceiling, drop him—it’d take at least two. Drugs would show in the autopsy, and so would the bruise of a knockout blow. Memo: see that stomach contents are analyzed.
Or you could hypnotize him—which is what they’re doing to me, dangling their glittering life in front of me and letting it swing slowly to and fro, until I can only gasp, yes, yes. At the instant of arrival there is honeyish Mrs. Singleton in her dottily beautiful car, sent specially to meet me when they could easily have told the coaches to pick me up, and prattling away as if I were an old friend. Then Sir Ralph bowls me a dolly, watches me cart it for six, and records his admiration for posterity. Even Harvey Singleton, the rapid reader, for whom all time is composed of instants in which the profit motive can operate, tells me more than he need and stages a moment of soul-baring at the study window. “Stages” is the word. Memo: go and stand on the gravel and look whether a man driving away could actually see watchers behind glass a story higher.
What else? (He was now so cold that Deakin’s whiskers took on the appearance of hoarfrost.) “I can’t think how we’d have coped if all this had happened a couple of months ago.” And then that leaky explanation about it being terribly upsetting, and making it difficult to keep a proper eye on things. What else had she been doing with Mrs. Chuck and Claire and Mr. Waugh, for heaven’s sake? And then Mr. Singleton had claimed that Deakin’s death was not trivial to them, even at this stage of the season: rum epitaph for a faithful servant. And the Singletons had told different tales about who’d insisted on calling in Scotland Yard, though Singleton himself might have said “we” for the sake of family solidarity. Memo: ask why Deakin was making a model landing craft. And why was Singleton whispering?
It wasn’t much. (He sighed, and his breath hung mistily in the icy air.) Apart from the Claverings’ assumption that the rules didn’t apply to them—getting a wallah down from London, shoving the corpse in here, not allowing anyone to bother about an autopsy, freezing out the local police—there was only one genuinely odd thing: Singleton had heard a noise of drumming, but Deakin’s neck had been broken clean, and his shoes and the cupboard door had been unmarked, though both were so polished that they looked as if a fly’s footsteps would have scarred them. When a man hangs, he drums his heels—in literature; in fact he can only achieve that last tattoo if he’s bungled the job and is strangling. But if you’re inventing a story you put the drumming in because it feels right.
Not enough to bother a prosecutor with, or anyone else. Still, there was another rum thing about the wallah from London: that Tom Scott-Ellis and Harry Brazzil, the two most eager blue-blood suckers in Scotland Yard should have been joint favorites in the Herryngs Stakes—several other chaps had been far less busy. And then, with as much fuss as a big bank robbery would have warranted, it had been Pibble who’d been sent, quiet, easygoing Jimmy Pibble, whose main achievement in life had been to lever himself out of the upper-lower-middle class into the lower-middle-middle, despite the handicap of an overrefined wife—just the man to buy a social gold brick for its shiny outside, they’d thought. (No, not fair to the Ass. Com., who couldn’t have known about the gold brick. It would just have been put to him, in grunts and half sentences, that an officer with some respect for his betters would be more welcome to the Claverings. They had chosen their own vulture, and specified one who didn’t like the taste of lion.)
Crippen, I’m cold, he thought, but did nothing about it; stared at the blind face of the corpse and wondered why the Chichester Theatre had felt like a social gaffe. They ought to be used to gaffes, ride them as easily as a liner taking a ten-foot wave. Answer, he’d asked a question they hadn’t prepared an answer for.
O.K., so he was being conned, and there was nothing to do about it. Make a fuss, ask tiresome questions, insist on formalities, and they’d all (including the Ass. Com. and Brazzil and Scott-Ellis) assume he was trying to spin the Herryngs paragraph in his book out into a Herryngs chapter. There was nothing to go on, except the drumming noise and the smell of being conned (sense of smell thanks to the exquisitely patient process of moving from upper-lower-middle to lower-middle-middle); so stay conned. Perhaps hint to the Ass. Com. of his unease (given the luck of catching him in the lift or something—no formal request for interview) and let him carry the ghostly load of responsibility. Otherwise let sleeping lions lie. A good policeman never has hunches, his first boss, Dick Foyle, used to say.
Gloomy with the foreknowledge of self-betrayal, Pibble turned to the door. His heart bounced in irrational panic as he walked toward its safe-like solidity: they’d locked him in to die freezing, while eighty Americans chumped knowledgeably through bleeding steaks not twenty yards away!
But the latch was on the other edge of the door, hidden in a triangle of shadow, and the door opened smoothly. He turned off the light, shut Deakin back into solitude, and stood shuddering with cold in the flagged passage. Cold and shock. He had believed them capable of it—they were capable of it, dammit.
O.K., he was going quietly. But let them stretch his conscience one notch further and the lion would feel the talons of this vulture, blunt, bourgeois talons though they were.
12:25 P.M.
The Chinese room was empty except for its trophies. Pibble mooned about, gazing halfheartedly at this and that: here a scrap of tarnished fabric from the Field of the Cloth of Gold; there a side drum which had been one of those not heard at the burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna; here an invitation to a soirée at the Hell-Fire Club; there fragments of birch twig rescued from the flesh of some previous Clavering after a thrashing at Eton.
He stopped, astonished and outraged, in front of a case of exhibits from the St. Quentin Raid—mainly weapons, all modern and apparently in good working order: the Sten which Sir Ralph himself had carried; the long-barreled Colt .45 with which “Dotty” Prosser, the Raid’s posthumous V.C., had wiped out two nests of machine gunners guarding the submarine pens; a captured Skoda automatic; the famous but now dusty grenade which had failed to explode when it landed in the middle of the Raid’s command group; Sir Ralph’s sketches for one of his big booby traps; and so on. There must be a dozen gangs in London, not to mention several thousand semi-psychopaths up and down the country, to whom this lot would seem worth more than even the lovely Romney of Miss Hester Clavering which smiled with sweet eighteenth-century blankness immediately above the deadly collection. And deadly they looked, ready to go bang-bang or rat-a-tat this instant and mow down the revolting plebs—there was even a round of grayness where a drop of fresh oil had fallen onto the typewritten label of the Colt, so carefully was everything maintained in its lethal perfection.
Ah, hell, what was the point in being outraged? It was just typical Clavering, the assumption that pleas to hand over weapons to the police didn’t apply to them. To school himself into the mood of going quietly, Pibble turned away and walked across to inspect the bronze Epstein bust.
S
een close, it was a delicious piece of work. Pibble had always associated an element of caricature with these portraits—shaggy Shaw rendered as an intellectual goat, saintly Einstein haloed with his own hair. This time the artist seemed to have chosen as Sir Richard’s chief characteristic a deliberate mildness, a balanced sweetness of mind, which he had interpreted into bronze, treating the willing metal with less than his usual fierceness so that the modeling of even the ear lobes seemed to be part of a central douce harmony.
Curiously, the big-joke Dali above the bust shared some of its qualities, for here, too, smoothness reigned, painstaking and glossy. But beneath the sheer patina of varnish wallowed all the Surrealist furies; Sir Ralph’s face was purple and twisted with Goya-like rage, and his scarlet uniform was shown as a series of half-opened drawers full of corpses tumbled together like odd socks.
“Many of our visitors, especially the Germans, admire it considerably, sir,” said a voice at Pibble’s elbow. Mr. Waugh had glided in, silent on the moss-thick carpet, and now stood in a beautifully calculated pose of haughty subservience.
“Can I get you anything, sir?” he added, and the disguise became marginally less complete: there was that in the actor-butler’s intonation which made it clear that the apparently limitless possibilities of “anything” began and ended with a stiff drink.
“No, thanks,” said Pibble. “Do you know if the Doctor and Sergeant Maxwell have come?”
“I believe so, sir. Mr. Singleton is talking to them in the Zoffany Room.”
This time the faltering of tone was more marked. Pibble decided to risk a timid probe.
“Mr. Singleton must pay the most fantastic attention to detail,” he said.
“Too sodding right he does,” said Mr. Waugh rancorously. “Rings up Dick Looby at the Spotted Lion and asks him how much I had last night. Dick’s a decent fellow, but he can’t afford not to tell him. I tell you, that’s the way to drive a man to secret drinking—I’ve seen it happen in long runs again and again—and Mr. Singleton thinks he can do it to me. Got me by the short hairs, he has; knows I’d never find another billet like this, any more than he’d find someone else to do the Beach bit—you read Wodehouse?”
The Old English Peep Show Page 4
