Death by Sheer Torture

by Robert Barnard

  ‘No,’ I said firmly. Then I went on in my plodding policemanlike fashion: ‘Had there been any tensions, dissensions, disagreements over the last few days?’

  ‘He’s inquisiting us!’ chortled Kate. ‘Just like in a book.’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said Mordred, who was turning out to be easily the most sensible of the lot. ‘But then I’m a bit out of it. If it wasn’t brought to table here, I wouldn’t have noticed.’

  I turned to Aunt Sybilla. ‘You probably saw more of him. Was there anything that you noticed?’

  ‘Well, no, Perry dear. Otherwise I’d have said. Of course, you know us. We’re very much creatures of instinct.’ (Oh yes—pure children of nature: with resident butler and cook, a dozen cleaners, two gardeners, and several acres of house to be natural in.) ‘If we feel anything, we say it out. So much better to be open. So if there had been any major row, I’d certainly have heard of it . . . Certainly.’

  The fact is, the way this bear-garden is arranged, with each group going its own way in its own wing, and each wing miles from the other wings, it was perfectly possible for major rows, wide-ranging conspiracies or out-and-out cold war to take place and yet be kept secret, provided a moderately good face was put on on ‘public’ occasions. Which meant, I took it, at sherry time and over dinner. I chewed over this as I enjoyed Mrs McWatters’s excellent steak and kidney pudding.

  I chewed over something else as well, and that was the feeling I was beginning to get that the family, and Sybilla in particular, was welcoming me back into the happy group, reinstating me in the family Bible and all, because they thought that I could protect them in some way from the consequences of having a murder in the family. Nobody loves a policeman these days except when a crime might occur or has occurred, and the Trethowans were less ‘law and order’ people than most. But now I was a friend in high places, to make sure their cosy little world was not shattered. As you can understand, I imagine, this sort of protection was one thing I had no intention of giving them. So as we gracefully spooned our syllabub into our (not noticeably impaired by the tragedy) digestive systems, I made a frightfully official-sounding clearing-of-the-throat noise, and started actually to address them all:

  ‘If you don’t mind, Aunt Syb . . . and, er, Uncle Lawrence . . . there’s just one thing I’d like to say, now we’re all together. I’m very grateful to you for welcoming me back home as you have. And of course for your sympathy. And I shall certainly do all I can to advise you in the present difficult situation. And if possible to help you. But what I can’t do —’

  But I was interrupted. From the distance there came once more the hair-raising sound of infant strife, a yowling, rolling, thumping sound that seemed to be approaching us irresistibly like the armies of Genghis Khan, spreading havoc and destruction in their wake. Peter and Maria-Luisa compounded matters by screaming at each other in their own queer linguistic modes of communication, and it ended by Peter going disgruntledly out just as the Squealies were at the door. Aunt Sybilla raised her eyebrows.

  ‘You were saying, Perry dear?’

  But at that moment there was yet another interruption. The door to the hall opened, and in came PC Smith. Looking more than a little overwhelmed (for this was not just gentry, remember, but his own particular gentry), he crossed the great open space of the dining-room and, standing by Aunt Sybilla’s chair, said in a low voice:

  ‘Superintendent Hamnet would be glad to see you as soon as possible after dinner, Miss Trethowan.’

  It was as if he’d made an indecent suggestion.

  ‘Perry!’ squawked Aunt Sybilla, her eyes bulging with outrage. ‘I do think I might have been spared this!’

  I banged my fist on the table with a force that raised the glassware and crockery an inch.

  ‘What I was just about to say was that the one thing I cannot and will not do is protect you from the normal processes of the law in a case of murder. Nothing can protect anyone from that—except diplomatic immunity.’

  ‘Then I must set about getting it with all despatch,’ said Sybilla, throwing down her napkin and stalking from the room.

  The meal, not surprisingly, more or less broke up after this. Maria-Luisa poured herself another large glass of wine and stomped out after her maniacal brood. Aunt Kate wheeled a mumbling, dribbling Lawrence off to bed with a reproachful ‘He’s not to be upset, you know.’ Only Mordred seemed inclined to linger. He poured us both a glass of port, and I was about to settle down to a little chat before going up to my sister when McWatters came in with a little servant’s cough (so different from a policeman’s magisterial clearing of the throat) and said: ‘Oh, Mr Peregrine, sir, there’s a phone call for you.’

  ‘Probably the Yard,’ I said, getting up. ‘You’re sure it’s not really for Hamnet?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir. It’s for you. Actually sir, the leddy said she was your wife.’

  ‘My God!’ I said. I hurried out to the extension I’d seen in the hall, then changed my mind and asked McWatters if there wasn’t anywhere more private.

  ‘There’s Sir Lawrence’s study,’ he said doubtfully. ‘But mebbe it’d be best if you were to use the one in the old butler’s pantry.’ He led me down a corridor, through the great baize door, down a staircase, and into the well-remembered, high-ceilinged domestic palace which my great-grandfather Josiah had deemed suitable to minister to his needs. You could have cooked the Coronation dinner in here. But McWatters went to a side door and showed me into a considerable and well-equipped apartment, suitable to the dignity of an Edwardian butler.

  ‘If you’ll take up the receiver, sir, I’ll put you through in a moment.’

  Within thirty seconds I heard a click and said: ‘Jan?’

  ‘Perry! Home is the sailor, home from the —’

  ‘Cut that out! How did you know I was here?’

  ‘I read about the death in the papers. It sounded fishy. I knew it was your day off, so I kept ringing home. Then suddenly I put two and two together. The sentimental little lad has gone back for the funeral baked meats.’

  ‘Nothing of the sort. I am here under orders and under protest.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I guessed, actually. Knowing Joe. So my deduction from the newspaper report that all is not quite quite, so to speak, was right?’

  ‘Nothing is ever quite quite with my family. You’ve no idea how dire it all is.’

  ‘Never fear. Help is on the way. Daniel and I are coming for the weekend. You know how I’ve always wanted to meet your f —’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, you are not.’

  ‘Don’t tell me they’d refuse to meet me?’

  ‘I refuse to let you meet them.’

  ‘There’s obviously room for us. I bet we could both fit into your bedroom.’

  ‘There’s room for the Eighth Army in my bedroom. That is not the point.’

  ‘Perry, I know you can’t be officially on the case, so why are you being so appallingly stuffy?’

  ‘Because,’ I said, ‘I do not choose to bring my wife and son to a house where a murder has just been committed and in which a murderer is still at large.’

  This stumped her a bit. There was a long silence.

  ‘So long as it’s not that you’re ashamed of me in front of your family,’ Jan said, rather feebly.

  ‘You know perfectly well I’m ashamed of my family in front of you.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right, then. That’s as it should be. Perhaps it is best if we actually stay in the village.’

  ‘You’ll have a job. “The Village” is about ten houses.’

  ‘And a pub. The Marquis of Danby.’

  ‘That fleabitten hostelry. I had my first pint there.’

  ‘Probably it’ll be some kind of anniversary, then.’

  ‘Don’t be deceived by the grand name: it’s a tiny country inn with two cramped bars. They certainly won’t take guests.’

  ‘They certainly do. The AA book says so.’

  ‘My God. It�
�s probably been tarted up.’

  ‘Better that than fleas, anyway. Well, so I’ll collect Daniel after lectures are over, give him something to eat to keep him happy, and then drive over in the early evening. Wasn’t it lucky I got a place at Newcastle?’

  ‘Jan, I still —’

  ‘See you tomorrow. Love to the aunties and uncles!’

  And she rang off. I sometimes win arguments with my wife, but never those conducted over the telephone. I shrugged my shoulders in irritation, and decided to go and have a good talk to Cristobel.

  CHAPTER 5

  CRISTOBEL

  Cristobel—that’s a bloody silly name to start with. Or silly spelling. Because it’s pronounced perfectly normally, as in Pankhurst. That sort of silly-buggery runs in our family. Would you believe that my cousin Pete was supposed to be called Pyotr? Only the clergyman making a deliberate mistake at the font and standing Uncle Lawrence out that it couldn’t be rectified saved him from that fate. And look at Kate. I sometimes wonder whether she wasn’t conceived in a private box at Covent Garden, during one of the more missable sections of Die Walküre.

  You mustn’t think I’m not fond of Cristobel. I am in my own way. And she’s worth all the rest put together. So bear this in mind if I am occasionally a little negative about her. She could irritate me—and she certainly irritated me in the course of this case. For a start she is a Girl Guide. I suppose she got this from Aunt Kate. Did I tell you that when Kate attended the Nuremberg Rally of 1938 she did so in Girl Guide’s uniform? There was a great flurry of Brown Owls about that, and they were just getting down to a delicious Discussion of Principle on the subject in the highest Guiding circles when Hitler invaded Poland and out she had to go. They all thought it very unsporting of Hitler. Well, Cristobel is by now a Brown Owl or a Grey Squirrel or something of the sort, and she is rather a lumpy, earnest, well-meaning sort of girl, one of those people who can probably light a fire with twigs but might well destroy acres of national parkland by doing so.

  After that rather unsatisfactory conversation with my wife I went up through the green baize doors and into the main part of the house. McWatters was just entering the dining-room as I passed through the hall, and I wondered whether he’d been listening in on the hall extension. Then I went up the great staircase (which seemed to have been conceived for corpulent fin-de-siècle monarchs to make an entrance down, arm in arm with their consorts) and to my bedroom. Dear Aunt Sybilla had told McWatters to put me in my old room, but he had had the sense to realize I would not much want a room in the Gothic wing, even had the police allowed it, so I’d been given the principal guest bedroom in the main block—an enormous room, inevitably, big enough to erect a circus tent in, with its own bath and shower and, of all things, John Martin’s The Destruction of Sennacherib taking up most of the inner wall. I have grown up with nineteenth-century painting, it’s very much part of me, but still I decided that The Destruction of Sennacherib was not under present circumstances the kind of interior decoration best calculated to cheer the faltering spirit. Alas, there was no question of taking it down, or turning its face to the wall. I walked round the room for a bit, tut-tutting at the thought of Jan’s and Daniel’s arrival; I got out my notebooks (part of my personal equipment for a case) but wrote nothing in them; then I decided to go along and have my talk to Cristobel.

  Cristobel, after her hysterics, had been put in another guest-room only three doors from mine—hardly more than the length of Liverpool Street Station away. I tapped on the door. There was a long pause, and I stood picturing her there, frightened out of her wits. I had just reached down to open the door and put her out of her misery when there was a small ‘Come in.’

  She was lying in bed, very white against the sheet, and in that big room oddly and unusually small. She managed a frightened smile.

  ‘Oh, hello, Perry. Is it you? I’m glad you’ve come.’

  ‘Hello, Chris. How are you, old girl?’

  ‘Getting over it. I hope to be up and about tomorrow.’

  (Up and about is the sort of phrase Chris uses. She probably barges round the Guides’ camps bellowing ‘Rise and Shine’.)

  ‘Don’t you think about getting up yet. There’s nothing you can do: the police have taken over the whole wing. Just you try and make a proper statement to Hamnet—he’s the CID man—then stay put where you are.’

  ‘The CID? Then it’s definitely murder?’

  ‘Oh yes, I’d say so. But you knew that, didn’t you?’

  Chris shook her head. ‘I didn’t know. I just couldn’t believe—I mean, who would do anything like that? I mean—like that?’

  ‘Somebody, my lass. So we’ll just have to face up to it. Would you like to tell me what happened?’

  ‘I suppose I can try, if I’ve got to tell the—them, tomorrow. Well, I went up to bed at my usual time.’

  ‘When’s that?’

  ‘About half past ten. I have to get up early to do most of the housework before Daddy gets down. Got down. Anyway, when I went to bed, Daddy went . . . downstairs. To . . . well, you know. When he did it, it was always after I’d gone to bed, in case I was disturbed by the . . . bumps. He was awfully considerate like that.’

  Charming olde-worlde courtesy, I thought. But I just nodded.

  ‘Well, about a quarter past twelve I . . . er . . . still hadn’t got to sleep —’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason, I just hadn’t. And so I came down to the kitchen to get an aspirin or something. It’s on the first floor of the wing, you remember, and you can . . . hear. And so I heard, and I thought: this isn’t right. He never did it for that long. And I ran downstairs into the Gothic room and —’

  ‘Were the lights on?’

  ‘Yes, very bright. And I saw —’

  She stopped, sobbing, and I sat on the bed and put my arms around her, like I did when our mother died. Eventually she calmed down and wiped her eyes.

  ‘Did you notice the cut cord?’ I asked.

  Chris nodded. ‘I dashed over and switched the thing off, and it—he—came down with a last bump and he seemed about six inches away and it was—horrible. I screamed and ran out of the wing into the house, and screamed and screamed.’

  ‘Who came out to you first?’

  ‘Oh dear. McWatters, I think. Did you know he wears a nightshirt? Oh no, you don’t know him. Then Mrs Mac. Then—Mordred, I think, and later Sybilla.’

  ‘What did they do?’

  ‘Someone—McWatters, I think—ran to the Gothic wing, then dashed back and called the police. He told them to bring a doctor, but he must have known . . . I knew.’

  ‘I see. Then they put you to bed?’

  ‘Yes. They tried slapping me, and water, but Mordred said it was barbaric and the doctor would be here in a minute. So they got me to bed, and I don’t remember much more. Eventually I talked a bit to the police, but I kept —’

  ‘I know. Well, it’s over now. Perhaps Hamnet won’t need to talk to you again about that. I’ll report back to him. Chris, what had things been like in the family recently?’

  ‘Oh, you know, much as usual. We each lived in our own wings, but still—it isn’t an easy house to live in, Perry.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘But I don’t complain. It’s always the way, isn’t it? The men go off and do the glamorous and exciting jobs and the women get left behind looking after the older generation. It’s always been like that and I suppose it always will be.’

  Hmmm, well, I thought. I’d been getting stuff like this in letters from my sister recently, showing, I suppose, that this kind of lowest-common-denominator feminism has at last filtered down into the kind of magazine my sister reads. As the bandwagon grinds slowly to a halt, my sister hears of the movement. Now, the fact of the matter is that my sister stayed home with my father because she had no aptitude for any kind of interesting job and wanted to inherit what was going. Highly sensible reasons, of which I heartily approve, but no basis for a good fem
inist whine. My great-aunts, daughters of the redoubtable Josiah, may not have had much choice, but Chris did, and made it. And if anyone by some laughable contingency had offered Chris a glamorous and exciting job, she would have cast a pall of the humdrum over it within hours of signing on. Still, this wasn’t quite the time for saying things like that.

  ‘You say it wasn’t easy. What especially do you mean? Had there been any rows, any big problems?’

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary, really. Aunt Kate has been very odd since her breakdown, as I suppose you’ll have noticed.’

  ‘Yes. But hardly odder. Better on the whole, I thought.’

  ‘Perhaps. But you never know where you are. What else? Oh, people were always complaining about the Squealies. Then there was a great fuss over some picture or other —’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Aunt Sybilla was going to redecorate one of the guestrooms. You know she sometimes feels her artistic talents aren’t stretched to the full these days.’ (When my sister says things like that there is not a hint of irony. I have heard her refer to our father as a great composer. She is a true Trethowan.) ‘She went looking for something that was put up in a lumber-room when they first hung Aunt Eliza’s pictures of the family in the drawing-room. But you know how it is. That was twenty-five or thirty years ago. They couldn’t find the picture.’

  ‘I see. What was it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Rossetti, or Holman Hunt, or somebody.’

  ‘Did she think it had been stolen?’

  ‘Oh—you know: she went around saying it was very odd, and telling Mordred he ought to do an inventory of the whole house—as if poor Morrie hasn’t got enough to do with the family history. It would take years. Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t turn up, in some room or other.’

  ‘Very likely it will. There must be some nobody’s been in since the builders moved out. So Father wasn’t really at the centre of any of these rows, was he?’

  ‘No, not really. He sort of stirred things up, now and then. Helped them along. Of course, it’s awful to say things about him now he’s dead . . .’