The Old English Peep Show

by Peter Dickinson

  “Yes,” said Pibble. “Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes.”

  “Right,” said Mr. Waugh. “I can do that, too: worth a guinea a visitor to Mr. Bleeding Singleton, I am. But he thinks he could scrabble along without me and he knows I couldn’t do without him. He’s got me by the knackers.”

  “I suppose nerves are always a big frayed by the end of the season,” said Pibble cautiously.

  “First time I’ve noticed it,” said Mr. Waugh. “July, August, that’s the time for tantrums, but by now everything ought to be slack and easy. Why, you heard how sharp Miss Anty spoke up to me this morning. ’Tisn’t like her, Officer. Something’s up.”

  Mr. Waugh’s voice was now an urgent whisper. During the last short speech, layers of saloon-bar knowingness had peeled off his voice until he spoke with the direct appeal of the peasant, petitioning Authority (baffled, inadequate Pibble) to simplify the unfair mysteries of the universe. A faint bloom of sweat, a condensation of tiny globules, dewed the melon-structured tissues of his brow and jowls.

  “Is it something to do with Deakin’s death?” said Pibble. “I hear he was a bit of a womanizer, for instance.”

  “Him?” said Mr. Waugh, astonished back into the saloon bar. “Only woman old Deak would’ve taken an interest in was one made of knot-free deal, so he could’ve gone over her with his spokeshave. Anyway it started before that—everyone a bit nervy for about a fortnight, and then, whammo, something happens and we’re all biting each other’s head off, even Miss Anty, as I’ve always gotten on with particularly well. Three, four days of that and Deak hanged himself. Hanged himself because of it, if you ask me, and this, sir, is a document which many of our American visitors find most intriguing, being the then Sir Spenser Clavering’s original letter to William Penn regretting as how a previous engagement made it impossible for Sir Spenser to come and help found Pennsylvania.”

  “Goodness me,” said Pibble. How would a London detective behave after a history lesson from such a portentous domestic? He would tip him, with hesitation. Pibble found half a crown and said, “This has been the most interesting, dash it—” (Damn. A bit too much of the Woosters there.) “Thank you very much.”

  “Thank you very much, sir,” said Mr. Waugh. “I endeavor to give satisfaction.”

  He wafted himself silently toward the door, yielding the floor to the watching Mr. Singleton.

  “You’ve got an extraordinary collection here,” said Pibble warmly.

  “It’s a disgraceful muddle, in my opinion,” said Mr. Singleton. “Our German visitors, and I say this in confidence, are frequently disappointed by the inadequate exhibits on the Raid.”

  “Do you get many Germans?”

  “An average of seven point two per cent increase in each of the last four years. The future of European tourism is in their hands.”

  “Ironic,” said Pibble. “That landing craft Deakin was working on—was that his own idea, or part of some planned expansion?”

  “Both, to be candid. Poor Deakin had got it into his head that I was going to build him a special display building for a panorama of the Raid, with himself in charge of it to talk a lot of unsubstantiated gossip about the Claverings at St. Quentin.”

  “Strip his sleeve and show his scars,” said Pibble.

  “It may seem to you statistically impossible, but only one man was wounded on Uncle Dick’s ship, and he was hit while we were waiting to board. We were packed so tightly on deck that it took me a full minute to get a bar of chocolate out of my map pocket, and the sky was stiff with Stukas, but Uncle Dick brought us out. I don’t need to tell you that it is not the kind of episode on which it is possible to calculate the odds, but they must be very high indeed.”

  “Fantastic,” said Pibble, surprised as much by the sudden liveliness of tone as by the actual story.

  “Yes. But we mustn’t keep Kirtle waiting—he’s a busy man. I expect you would prefer to interview them in private, so I will leave you.”

  With the demurest of footfalls they paced the vast hall. Mr. Singleton opened the door of the Zoffany Room but did not go in himself. It was lucky that Sergeant Maxwell was in uniform; otherwise Pibble would have been certain to commit the blunder of acknowledging them in the wrong social order, for it was Dr. Kirtle who had the slabby raw-beef face of the typical village bobby, whereas Maxwell was graying, harassed, wrinkled, humorous, tired—a good but overworked country G.P. to the life. Pibble shook hands with the Doctor and nodded to the Sergeant.

  “I’m sorry to bring you out here like this,” he said.

  “Not at all, not at all,” said the Doctor, in a strange half-whisper whose obsequiousness seemed to imply that the privilege of breathing the same air as the Claverings excused any inconvenience. Pibble felt stifled with all this insistent grandeur.

  “Let’s go outside,” he said.

  They both flashed him a sharp glance of surprise—in this sort of household one stayed where one was put until one was given permission to move. For a second Maxwell weighed the imponderables of two unlike disciplines, and then (no doubt in the comfortable knowledge that there was a senior officer to take the responsibility) made a vague half shuffle toward the door. The Doctor sensed himself outvoted, whispered “Oh, well,” and moved in the same direction. Pibble led them out to the lawn where he had first seen Mr. Waugh sitting.

  “Any bothers, Doctor?” he said. “Hanged himself all right, in your opinion?”

  “Dear me, yes,” said the Doctor, in his peculiar breathy whisper. Pibble now saw, in the full light of a sweet October noon, that his neck was puckered with the aftermath of a hideous wound. The flicker of shock in Pibble’s eyes must have been very marked, or the Doctor peculiarly sensitive.

  “I was on the Raid, too, you know,” he breathed. “I bought it on the quay, just as we were getting ready for the final embarkation. Harvey Singleton carried me onto the boat and the General nursed me home, pumped me full of morphine, knew just what to do—astonishing man. But, yes, old Deak hanged himself, and I can’t think why. I hear he was a bit too keen on the ladies, and it might have been something to do with that. He managed it very efficiently, too—clean break, dead in a second.”

  “No peculiar bruises, marks of that kind?”

  The Doctor ceased pacing the bungey lawn and turned a chill eye on him.

  “Great Scott, no!” he said. “You’ll be asking me about stomach contents next.”

  “If you don’t mind,” said Pibble.

  “I mind very much indeed,” said the Doctor slowly. “What sort of people do you think you’re dealing with? The Claverings aren’t here to provide you with your tuppeny-ha’penny sensation which you can peddle to your pals in Fleet Street. They’re, they’re … Old England!”

  “Yes” said Pibble, “that’s just why. Suppose the question came up at the inquest. Unlikely, but just suppose. Isn’t it better for us to be able to say we looked, and there was nothing suspicious, than to say we wouldn’t dream of doing so? I’d prefer to go the whole hog and see that the question was asked. I’d make it clear that the investigation had throughout been thorough, normally thorough. Anyway, I’m afraid I must insist on a proper analysis. Let me tell you, Dr. Kirtle, that there’s far more nasty publicity in doubts and mysteries than there is in certainties.”

  “All right, all right,” whispered the Doctor curtly. “You know more about this sort of thing than I do, I suppose. We’re damned suspicious down here, you’ll find. They’ll have to do the job in Southampton, of course, but I’ll lay it on. Anything else?”

  “Well, it’s a tiny point, but I’m bothered about Mr. Singleton trying to give him the kiss of life. He looked so very dead, and I’d have thought Mr. Singleton could have seen at a glance it was hopeless. You know him better than I do, but he doesn’t seem to me the kind of man to make a mistake like that.”

  Winter glazed the Doct
or’s eye again.

  “Harvey Singleton,” he said, “had a good war. A very good war indeed. After the Raid he was parachuted into France three times. He was brave, clever, and a brilliant shot. No doubt he saw a lot of dead men, knifed, shot, blown up, garroted. But I doubt if he ever saw a man who’d had his neck broken by dropping three feet with a noose round his throat.”

  “No doubt you’re right,” said Pibble, stiff with the knowledge that his name was now chiseled deep into the Doctor’s opinion as that of a complete tick. The Doctor’s boneheaded reverence for great names comforted him not at all. “It’s only that I’m paid to think of all the questions which anybody might ask.”

  “Well, let me tell you another thing. When Lady Clavering died, Herryngs near as a toucher went to pieces. I won’t go into the details. But it was Harvey Singleton who held it together, put the Claverings back on their feet. He gave up a very promising job with a merchant bank in the City to come and do it, and he owed them nothing, nothing. He wasn’t even married to Anty then. This place is his monument, almost as much as it is any of the Claverings’. Remember that.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. I will.”

  Pibble turned to Sergeant Maxwell, who had dropped a tactful few paces behind as they’d walked along the broad belt of sward between the wall of the house and the drive; they’d come now, in fact, right around the Private Wing to its south face. The Adam-the-Gardener figure, whom he’d last seen spraying the plants in the far colonnade, was now sweeping the edge of the turf with slow, thoughtful strokes where the General’s E-Type had sprayed gravel onto the grass.

  Sergeant Maxwell dithered unhappily forward to where Pibble waited. A nasty dilemma for a cap-touching local bobby, whether to side with the high-powered officer, who’d be gone back to London tomorrow, or with the Doctor, who had moved off asthmatic with contempt and anger and who would still be about, week after week, year after year, a witness of how Maxwell had borne himself in the hour of trial. Pibble tried to make things as easy as he could for the poor man.

  “There’s not much I want to ask you, really,” he said. “But I’d better check that you’ve done all the proper things, just in case …”

  Distant but unmistakable, the sound of two shots rang across the park, neither the crack of pistols nor the bark of rifles but a deeper, thudding boom. Pibble raised his eyebrows.

  “It’s the duel, sir,” said the Sergeant. “Two of the tourists fight a duel with proper dueling pistols on the old Bowling Green. They use blanks, o’course, but they dress ’em up in old-fashioned clobber and proper lifelike it looks.’

  “Sounds terrifying,” said Pibble. “Don’t they have a lot of wadding flying about, getting into people’s eyes?”

  “Old Deak fixed the guns so they’d fire very crooked indeed, he did tell me, sir.”

  “Oh,” said Pibble, “did you know him well?”

  “Well, sir, we played darts most Thursday and Monday evenings at the Clavering Arms.”

  “The point is,” said Pibble, “that none of us have any real doubt that poor Deakin hanged himself, but he didn’t leave a note and we can’t say the thing’s satisfactorily cleared up until we have some idea about a motive. When did you see him last?”

  “Three nights gone, sir. Night afore he hanged himself.”

  “Did he seem any different from usual?”

  Maxwell rubbed a toecap against his calf, like an embarrassed schoolboy. Ten yards away the Doctor coughed, a harsh, painful rasp.

  “He seemed a bit sulky, like,” said Maxwell. Then the hesitant voice changed gear into a quick, decisive monotone, as though he had nerved himself to get a painful experience over. “It’s not right to speak against the dead, but he were a terrible one for the girls, always chasing and pestering after them and they wouldn’t have him, and he went on and on about the Maureen Finnick as how she was leading him on, till I were proper fretted for him, sir.”

  “Did anyone else hear this conversation?”

  “No, sir. We had the little bar all to ourselves, and he was mostly muttering, like.”

  “O.K.,” said Pibble. “Well, see that you get the details as clear in your mind as you can remember. Now, about what happened after the body was found—Mr. Singleton rang up the police station, I take it.”

  “Yes, sir. Asked for me special.”

  Maxwell ran steadily through what he had done, which had been everything necessary. When he had finished, Pibble paced out into the drive, and looked up at the house. Goodness, it was pretty, the precisely calculated frilliness of balustrade and finial, the endearingly domestic pediment, the generous swags of stone carving above the main windows—all subservient to the honest proportions of the basic rectangle, and all blotchy with gold lichen.

  Work, work, work. The first-floor windows mirrored one bobbly cloudlet and a surround of sky; at this angle the glass might just as well have been silvered—some monster or vampire, the Curse of the Claverings, could have been staring hungrily down from behind it and a watcher on the gravel would have seen neither tusk nor trunk. Pibble shifted about on the drive, trying to find a point from which the looped brocade curtains became visible, and his ghostly unease was suddenly given solid flesh when the sash he was peering at shot upward and Mrs. Singleton leaned out.

  “Luncheon in ten minutes, if that suits you, Superintendent,” she said (no need to shout, with her voice). “Just time for you to come and have a glass of hock, Fred. There’s beer for you, in the little kitchen if you want it, Maxwell. Don’t go into the big one—it’ll be full of Yanks in a couple of minutes and they’ll think you’re part of the act.”

  The sash slapped down, leaving none of the three a chance to answer; the Clavering blood, however charmingly embodied, was used to being obeyed. Dr. Kirtle, in fact, was already mincing gloomily off toward his glass of hock, and that gave Pibble the chance to satisfy a private inquisitiveness.

  “Were you on the Raid, too, Maxwell?” he said.

  “No, sir.” The Sergeant’s wilting melancholy deepened.

  “What was Mr. Singleton talking about before he came to fetch me?”

  “Ah … er … sir … ah … something quite different, sir.”

  “Never mind. Anyway, the main point is that you’ve carried though the correct procedure, as far as you were allowed to, and that Deakin talked to you in a very depressed fashion about his sex life.”

  “Well … er … yes, sir.”

  “Never mind. Off you go for your beer. I should get some notes down about that conversation. If you think of anything else, you can just let me know direct at Scotland Yard. You don’t have to tell them everything here, you know.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  Pibble stood still to give the Sergeant a decent start. More steaming intangibles, he thought: first Mr. Waugh’s outburst and then a policeman who’d been hurriedly coached to lie. He walked off toward the Main Block, hoping that if he went the wrong way round the whole edifice he’d be too late for the hock. He didn’t feel like standing there with a glass in his hand in the same room as the idiotic Doctor, who so openly despised him—at any rate not if Mrs. Singleton was in the room, too.

  Roughly opposite the Main Block he came up with Adam the Gardener, still sweeping with the stolid stroke of a man rowing the Atlantic.

  “Ah-hem!” said Pibble purposefully.

  The man straightened up and touched the brim of his hat. Beneath its shade his visage—such of it as could be seen through the prodigious growth of beard—seemed preternaturally dark, as though he were on the verge of apoplexy.

  “Did you know Mr. Deakin?” said Pibble.

  Something in the man’s attitude changed; he relaxed and ran a finger beneath the elastic of his beard, a gesture which revealed the true reason for the color of his face.

  “No, suh,” he said, in a booming Deep South voice. “I’s a stran
ger in dese parts.”

  “Staying long?” said Pibble.

  “You recknin’ to run me out of town, Sheriff?” said the Negro, in a different voice, a John Wayne drawl.

  “This burg ain’t big enough for you and me, Black Jake,” said Pibble.

  The Negro laughed.

  “Fuzz?” he said.

  “Fraid so,” said Pibble.

  “Me, I’m a criminal back home,” said the Negro, in what at last seemed to be his own voice.

  “Burnt your draft card?” said Pibble.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Sounds as if you’d rather talk with an English policeman than an American civilian.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “What do you make of this place?” asked Pibble, moving to a less tender subject.

  “You know something, Sheriff?” said the Negro. “This setup is just about like all the stories ’bout Virginia ’fore the war—the kind of stories her gramma told my gramma.”

  “They’ve done that on purpose, of course,” said Pibble.

  “Yeah, but they done it too damn well, like they believed it.”

  “At least they’ve got something to believe.”

  “Yeah … but … but they believe it all,” said the Negro, waving­ a hand to include the dream landscape, the exquisite house, and a noise of cheering, like far surf, which wafted from the concealed valley whence the shots had come. “Pardon me,” he added, and resumed his monotonous sweeping.

  Pibble walked on around the far wing, from which floated a cooking smell so appetizing that he decided it must be canned in aerosol sprays and vented to welcome the “visitors” back from their journey into the past. If so, something had gone amiss with Mr. Singleton’s passionately precise timing, for the Rocket and its dollar-happy load were still invisible; so, he realized, was its track, but looking at the generous sweep of turf he saw a minute fold which might conceal a ha-ha. He strolled over and found himself on a tiny platform with Lilliputian-scale rails curving away to his right. Three rails; so the system was electrified, and those generous puffs of smoke and galvanically working cylinders had been as phony as … as Adam’s beard.