The Old English Peep Show

by Peter Dickinson

  But why? They don’t believe ordinary common folk have motives, Miss Finnick had said. Policemen do, though. Why would business-efficiency Singleton knock off a couple of dotty old heroes? The old boys still think they’re as rich as Croesus, she’d said. The General had talked about Harvey’s sideshows. They wouldn’t let him show the dirty frieze. He gave up a very promising job with a merchant bank to put the Claverings back on their feet, and here he was, after all those striving years, running sideshows. Forty-nine, say—last possible age to decide between blazing success and gray mediocrity. And all that fizzing action bottled up inside him. Not surprising if the cork popped.

  The cork popped, then. Four days of intrigue, and somebody had argued somebody else into sending for a chap from London. Never mind who now, but it was an oddity. No, we’re over­running; Deakin had died in those four days. Could he have killed him, or was it just a lucky chance to set the General careering down his crazy slalom of deception, so sure to fail taking a curve too fast, relying on the lost reflexes of youth? Then all he’d had to do was nudge the plot nearer to discovery. Then Scoplow had told them about the telephone call, and he’d hung around at the top of the Tiger Pit while the General waited for him to come and ambush this intrusive Londoner—what would he have said if the hero had emerged triumphant, like Rikki-Tikki-Tavi out of the king cobras’ hole, covered with dirt, licking his whiskers? Perhaps the General would have been so cock-a-hoop at managing it alone that any excuse would have done.

  But they’d both waited for each other, the General and his son-in-law, and Singleton had waited longer. Pibble had seen it happen again—or heard it, rather—when Singleton, motionless in the blackness of the stair well, had outwaited the lion. What had he felt like during that first waiting, when the General might have babbled anything to the detective? Or perhaps he’d spent the whole history lesson leaning on the parapet above them, listening with his very good hearing. Then the fracas, then the last fearsome bark of the hero as the huge claws caught him. Then down the path to the cottage while Pibble was fastening the door; the victor, Pibble or General, would be sure to go there. He’d known the door was shut, too.

  Action next, killing the lion. Twice. Yes, of course. If the Admiral had really been killed by a pistol ball, it might still be in the lion’s two-fathom of guts, and the police might slice the beast up to look for it, and they’d find a modern bullet. Hide it; spray the long body with modern bullets, same size and caliber; a rimless .45 wasn’t it?

  Ah, hell, the whole thing was pure supposition; Pibble decided he believed some of it some of the time, like the Nicene Creed.

  But Singleton had “forgotten” to explain how to prime the pistols.

  He had been walking toward a belt of trees and was almost into their black shadows when he saw amid their upper branches two spike-topped helmets with flat brims, such as Sidney’s men might have worn at Zutphen. No, two towers with helmet-shaped roofs on the far side of the trees, enormous—why couldn’t you see them from the house? He shone his torch at them and found that they were on the near side of the trees, a small pastiche of the Tower of London, into which the railway gate was set.

  The key turned easily. Beyond the gates Pibble could see the glint of moonlight striking off the rails where they curved out from under the trees. There were mossy steps in the low embankment to his left, and then the path plunged steeply down. This must be another section of the ravine by which the bone-meal chapel stood. The path twisted between shrouding yews; logs were set across it to form crude steps at the steepest places. He came around a hairpin corner, shone his torch in front of him, and felt his heart bounce with panic as the beam fell on a very old man, on his knees, rapt, in front of a rough-hewn crucifix. The panic lasted only half a second before he realized that the figure, however priestly its attitude, was lay. Nicely done, though, with real sackcloth on the plaster limbs, and the cell behind clean with a bed of fresh bracken in the corner. There was even a charming hollow in the rock where a spring oozed out between small ferns to fill a natural basin—or perhaps an unnatural one, scooped here at the whim of some long-dead Clavering to provide drink for a living, breathing, wage-earning hermit. Odd world they’d lived in, those great Whig gentry—odd uses which they’d thought it proper to put their fellow men to. Still did. A jink in his train of thought made Pibble wonder who the next heir was, after Mrs. Singleton, and whether he’d inherited the same arrogance.

  Another mini-folly stood untenanted beside the path a few yards farther down; then the slope eased and the path widened to a mossy walk, and there was the Bowling Green. It wasn’t at all as he’d imagined it, not a lawn below formal terraces, fringed with heraldic topiary. This was a deep romantic chasm, with the Abbey roofs invisible and only the claustrophobic crags, shaggy with trees, surrounding the level turf. The space was a little larger than a tennis court, and when Pibble crossed it to look at the stream, which licked quietly along below the further cliff, he found that the crevice opened to his right so that he could now see what looked like the pitch of an outbuilding roof, and beyond it a star-obliterating line of blackness, the far crest of the valley.

  The icehouse was Gothick, flint-built, crenelated. Pibble opened the door and laid his torch on a shelf. The pistols were in a polished mahogany box lined with blue satin; they were larger than he’d expected, but nice to hold. Once you knew about it, it was easy to spot how crookedly the barrels were set, though Deakin had taken full advantage of the asymmetry of the flintlock on one side and sweated a tapering sleeve of steel down the other, covering its surface with fine chasing.

  Loading should have been straightforward enough but Pibble was trapped by his instinctive distrust of all contrivances, however primitive, and couldn’t believe that the measuring device at the neck of the flask would work; so he unclamped his pistol from the vise and tipped the barrel out onto the shelf. A nasty little pile of black granules mocked him—it had worked. But how do you extract a ball and wad from a pistol which has no powder in it to shove them out? There must be a method; it must have happened often enough in genuine flintlock days; but it’s not the sort of question a chance-come detective cares to ask at a great house after bungling an attempt to incriminate his host.

  He tried again, resolutely trusting all the antique gadgets, bonking the ramrod down onto the ball with manful precision. Nothing rattled when he turned the weapon horizontal, but he couldn’t bring himself to point it downward for fear of seeing the whole tiresome cargo cascade out on the floor. He shoved the steel forward and poured some of his spillage into the pan. Snapping the lid shut, he inspected the whole contrivance with wonder: the little flint was held in a miniature vise at the end of an arm on a spring; you pulled it back with your thumb to cock it, and then when you pulled the trigger it shot forward, bashing into the vertical steel to produce its minute meteor shower; the impact also shoved the steel forward, opening the lid of the pan because they were all one piece, thus letting the meteors sprinkle down into the saltspoonful of gunpowder, which then flared—flared enough to send a gout of flame down the pin-sized hole in the barrel, igniting the main charge.

  He stared at the gadget, humming, struck by the rum collection of ingenuities which man will assemble to achieve his peculiar ends. There is a town in remote Guatemala called El Progreso, whose sole industry is the cultivation of a single crop; a mountain railway has been built over fantastic canyons in order that this crop may be exported to another part of Guatemala; the crop is the staple diet of the cochineal beetle, which is in turn harvested and pulped so that its juices may be re-exported to enhance the color of European blancmanges without affecting their taste. Never was a town better named: it is by fitting together processes such as these that man heaved himself up from simian innocence to the point where he could assemble iron and carbon into a steel tube, add a flint, a mixture of niter and saltpeter and charcoal, and a lump of lead, and use the resulting contrivance to kill his brother.


  Pibble stalked out into the moonlight, pointed the results of Progress at the further cliff, and pulled the trigger.

  There was a fractional instant after the click, in which he could begin to think he had loaded wrongly, begin to loosen his grip on the butt. Then the thing went off with a noise louder and lower than a modern pistol, a true bark, not a yap. The butt bucked in his hand, up and to the left. The echoes lasted for several seconds, distinct but fading booms. Pibble counted five of them volleying between the two cliffs. Then he put the gun back in the icehouse, picked up his torch, locked up, and began to climb the path past the plaster hermit, brooding as he went.

  What was the best thing to do if he was wrong about Singleton—pragmatically best? They couldn’t have been all that drunk if they’d managed the complex process of loading (though the General had said it took a bit of time, and they’d had a lot of practice) and then shot accurately enough to produce one hit and one near miss. But need anyone know about the duel? Wouldn’t all England be happier if the evidence was faked so that they both appeared to have been killed by the lion? There could be a grand state funeral of the unconsumed portions, and the world could enjoy its big, soft weep. Say the lion had caught the Admiral, and the General was trying to rescue his brother and got nobbled, too? A good death—both original and heroic. Deakin would have to be fitted in somewhere: say he’d usually helped the Admiral feed Bonzo and his death induced the Admiral to try and do it alone. Rastus could be shipped home; five years in jug would keep him quiet. Everyone else would play. Yes. Better than two soured old soaks squabbling over a woman two generations younger than themselves.

  He went through the gate and locked it.

  Except that that would leave Singleton in honorable command of Herryngs, ready to shift the last of the Claverings out of the Private Wing, ready to expose the non-pederastic Rector to the view of salivating Yanks, ready to extinguish the last spark of genuine life in the House amid the neon glare of a dollar-earning fun fair. Well, good luck to him, provided he hadn’t murdered one old hero and possibly one whiskery coxswain for the sake of transforming his nonprofit concern into a tourist blue-chip.

  And how could you prove that, one way or t’other? Check with Mr. Waugh on how many shots/echoes he’d heard; take him to witness a statement from Miss Scoplow about how many she’d heard; have Bonzo sliced up and the bullets counted and inspected; search the Tiger Pit for the odd slug out; search the undergrowth round the Bowling Green for a place of ambush where Singleton had waited. That bullet, it would have to look roughly the same as one from the tommy gun (he wouldn’t have had time to get across to the stall and fetch that). A .45, then, and …

  He missed the next sleeper, stumbled sideways, banged his shin on the railway line and sprawled onto the bank of the cutting. As he climbed angrily back to his feet, his brain did one of those extraordinary linkages which the mind can sometimes achieve if you don’t force it—the gray blob which had been fretting him swam into his mind’s eye, fluttered for a second, and diminished with a rush of perspective to a dirty mark about a quarter of an inch across marring the white smoothness of the label under Dotty Prosser’s Colt—a long-barreled .45.

  And the grenade beside it had been dusty.

  Mr. Waugh was fast asleep on the dank lawn in the shadow of the Private Wing. His breath came loudly, but in the nasty gulps of the dead drunk. Fine witness to the number of bangs audible he’d be. Pibble shone his torch around and spotted a small tumbler which he picked up with his handkerchief and smelled. Neat whiskey. So some friendly spirit had brought out a warming toddy to comfort the poor old actor on his chilly vigil—someone who knew that in his shocked and dismal loneliness he would risk a sip and then a swig and then keel ponderously over.

  Pibble hid the tumbler in a tuft of long grass in the corner of the wall, where no mower could reach. The evidence would be barely useful, but he was angry and he wanted to know who’d actually carried the liquor.

  He couldn’t think of a method of getting Mr. Waugh indoors, off the rheumatism-breeding turf, without asking Singleton for help. Ah, well, five minutes wouldn’t make all that difference. First things first, and with a bit of luck the lit windows of the Kitchen Wing meant that the briefing was still in progress and everyone out of his way. The door to the colonnade was unlocked; dim bulbs shone amid the vines; but the Main Block was dark, and Pibble picked his way by torchlight across the Zoffany Room and into the enormous hall. The wetness of his shoes deadened their clacking on the resounding wood; at a real flat-foot’s pace he crept soundlessly into the Chinese Room, rapt in a charade of stealth, and tiptoed across the carpet toward the case of weapons.

  The label had been changed since the morning; and the dusty grenade had been cleaned and polished.

  Now he was certain, though there was no way of proving it unless they found the bullet. The main thing was to make sure of the gun; he knelt to look at the lock of the case, a flimsy brass affair, and then stood his torch to shine downward through the glass. As he was levering the seldom-used screwdriver device out of his penknife, his throat was seized from behind. Madly he tried to use the leg-hooking technique he had been taught for dealing with an assailant from the rear, but his instructor had not dealt with the case of a man who was kneeling when the assault came. Expert thumbs, cold as stone, probed direct for the jugular. He wrenched at the hands as uselessly as a baby trying to open a stiff doorknob; then even the faint light from the torch vanished into roaring blackness. Harvey Singleton had outwaited his enemy again.

  Light, when it came back, was a pale rhythmic flash accompanied by the clank of heavy metal and a rumbling sound. His neck was a woeful belt of pain, but when he tried to raise a hand to touch it he could not achieve even a half inch of play for the limb—he was encased in something stiff but soft.

  He filled his lungs to yell and felt the same constriction on his chest. The yell came out as a poor affair, a mild croak—the strangling had unmanned his vocal cords. It hurt even to try to twist his head, but by straining his eyes to their leftward limit he managed to glimpse the moon before a black shape eclipsed it in time to the clank, then the moon again, eclipse and clink again, moon … The rumble must be wheels; even through the padding he could sense their uneven joggle. Then the moon edged slowly into full view as the vehicle took a curve, and he could see that it had been a head and shoulders pumping up and down which had caused the interruption of its light. Then the clank made sense, too. He was lying on his back on a hand-operated rail trolley; Harvey Singleton was pumping the long arm that propelled it along the rails.

  “You’ll never get away, with this,” Pibble croaked.

  Singleton pumped on, silent, as remote from Pibble’s pains and terrors as a liner must seem from dying men in a lifeboat who can just see its plume of smoke smudging the horizon. A straitjacket, a very luxurious one, encased his limbs, he realized—just the kind of handy gadget that was sure to be stored in one of the Herryngs attics: you never knew when one of your guests might not go killing-crazy halfway through a wet weekend; or perhaps it had been made to measure for some past Clavering in whom the family madness surfaced too violently for social comfort. Why hadn’t Singleton simply tied him up? Answer, because the marks of the rope would show on his wrists and ankles. But the mark on his throat? Answer, it didn’t bear thinking about; there was one obvious way of hiding a stigma like that.

  “Did you kill Deakin?” he croaked.

  Singleton stopped the trolley and opened the gates to Old England. He had to push the trolley for several yards before it had enough momentum to be driven again by the pumping handle. He stopped once more in another hundred yards and bent down to lift Pibble’s rigid form across his shoulder, but in a moment of carelessness allowed their two heads to come close enough together for Pibble, despite the pang of twisting his neck, to snatch at the passing ear with his teeth, and get a good hold. With stolid patience—much the same as Pibb
le had earlier shown when removing the bramble from his own ear—Singleton laid him back on the trolley, their heads as close as if they had been lovers spooning under the big moon. Pibble ground his teeth, rejoicing in the taste of blood. Singleton’s fingers felt for his damaged neck; they seemed to know their way about, and suddenly one of them pressed deep in under the ear to find its chosen nerve. Pibble’s whole skull sang with agony. He opened his jaws.

  Singleton straightened up and then bent out of sight again. There was a slow tearing noise and he rose with a strip of cloth in his hand which he used to bind around his head, with a wad over the bleeding ear. So there would be no trail of blood after all. He picked Pibble up as unemotionally as he had the time before, jerked his shoulder twice to settle his burden comfortably, and walked off along a flagged path. Pibble’s head faced downward and with a shiver of unburied superstition he saw that Singleton was a monster, one whose monstrosity came by night and vanished again with sunrise: his legs ended in a pair of ballooning mushrooms, white, soft, obscene … No, he’d padded them with cloth to achieve an area of contact with the ground as broad as an elephant’s foot—he’d leave no footprints at all. That’s where he’d torn the strip of cloth from to bandage his ear. The path led down, breaking into steps every few yards. Each pace, each descent, shot its lance of agony through Pibble’s neck, for his head was supported only by the bruised spine and mangled tissues. Singleton must have known, but cared as little for his victim’s pain as he had for the chewing of his own ear, which must have hurt like hell. Pibble could still taste the blood of his enemy in his mouth, and wondered whether the pathologist would have the genius to spot it and diagnose an alien blood group. And what would Singleton do about his ear? Tooth marks are very distinctive. Cut it off? Very likely.

  They stopped at another door; Singleton lifted the latch and bore him into a wider turfed area, a courtyard among buildings. Seven steps more and he laid him on a platform and rolled him over onto his back. Directly behind Pibble’s head, a big beam reached toward the stars; at its top, supported by a small timber across the angle, the L-piece stood out sideways. From this dangled, just as in the silly little toy Miss Finnick had assembled, the summoning noose of the gallows.