Death by Sheer Torture

by Robert Barnard

  ‘If you don’t, we’ll probably never find out who did it.’

  ‘No. Well, he said he thought we should get somebody qualified to do the inventory—implying poor Morrie wasn’t, and that was a red rag to Aunt Sybilla. In any case, it’s almost all Uncle Lawrence’s property, in fact.’

  ‘And he didn’t want an investigation?’

  ‘Oh, I think he did say it would be a good idea. But then I suppose he had one of his days, or something. Anyway, one way or another the whole idea got forgotten.’

  ‘Chris, you’ve been with Father these last fifteen years. He wasn’t an easy man to get along with, I know. Which of the family would you say hated him most?’

  Chris thought for a bit. ‘Well, I suppose you, Perry.’

  ‘Apart from me,’ I said impatiently. ‘Let me tell you I have an absolutely cast-iron alibi, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say anybody actually hated him,’ said Cristobel, resuming her pensive pose. ‘It sounds so melodramatic. I mean, he and Maria-Luisa sometimes had words about the Squealies. They’re lovely children, but they must have been particularly trying to someone musical, don’t you think? And Mordred was a little bit put out when he wanted the professional art-historian in to do the inventory. Nothing more than that. He and Syb jogged along much as they always did.’

  ‘And how did you get on with him, Cristobel?’

  ‘All right. We went our own ways. I did most of the cooking and cleaning in this wing, but I had a lot of free time. I have the Guides and that. And I’m great friends with the vicar’s wife, and I sing in the choir. He didn’t interfere. Most of us in this house go our own ways, you know. On the whole it works very well.’

  I got up with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction.

  ‘There’s precious little to go on so far. Precious little in the way of possible motive. It just seems senselessly cruel and pointless.’

  ‘Senseless? Do you mean a . . . a lunatic might have done it? Someone from outside? Or Aunt Kate?’

  ‘I wasn’t pointing at Aunt Kate,’ I said. ‘If she did it, I’d bet it was for a very good reason. Well—you’d better get some sleep now, Chris. I’ll pass all this on to Hamnet, to spare you as much as possible tomorrow. If I were you I’d stop there and get a bit more of your strength back.’

  I kissed her and moved over to the door. It was just as I was opening it that Cristobel came out with her most interesting idea so far.

  ‘Perry,’ she said, ‘has it occurred to you that one of the Squealies might have done it? In play, I mean?’

  CHAPTER 6

  NIGHT PIECE

  I went back in and closed the door.

  ‘Do you think that’s possible, Chris? Could they have got through the house without being seen?’

  ‘I think so. It’s a big house, and we each live in our separate wings. You can hear people coming miles off and get out of the way. Uncle Lawrence would be the one they’d be most likely to meet, and you can certainly hear his wheels. Anyway, he’s often in Kate’s wing these days—he certainly was last night. She’s the one who looks after him.’

  ‘Kate implied they often got out.’ (I realized this sounded like caged animals, but so be it.)

  ‘They do. Not all that often, but they do. Mostly they play together. They’re not . . . terribly well behaved.’

  ‘So I noticed. They struck me as complete monsters. But do you think one of them might actually —’

  ‘Well, of course, they wouldn’t realize what they were doing. It would just be in fun, they’d think. But they are awfully naughty sometimes. They just don’t think.’

  ‘Do you think anyone could have used them? Put the suggestion into their minds? One of their parents . . . ?’

  ‘Oh Perry! Of course not! Nobody could be so wicked as to use a little child like that!’

  Poor innocent Cristobel! I saw I had distressed her. ‘I expect you’re right,’ I said. ‘Now you get a good night’s sleep, Chrissy, and I’ll see you in the morning.’

  I went back to my room. I didn’t feel ready for bed yet, and certainly not for sleep. I showered in a luxurious flow of water (none of your miserable modern trickles for Harpenden House) and soaped vigorously, as if to wash off the slime of such a homecoming. That was marvellous, but it was while I was doing it that my mind, still over-active, started to grapple with an odd feeling of dissatisfaction—something niggling away at the back of my mind that refused to come forward, you know how it is. Of course the whole day had not been of the sort to make me pirouette for joy, as you will have gathered, but there was something else—something that had not been quite . . . it was something, yes—that was when the feeling had begun—something connected with my talk with Cristobel.

  It was while I was towelling myself down that it came to me: she wasn’t relieved enough that I had come.

  Now don’t get the wrong idea about this. I suppose you’re thinking that this is a big macho thing on my part: he wants little sister to sob on his chest and say ‘Now you’ve come, Perry, I feel safe,’ and all that stuff that flatters the male ego and may have some truth in it or no truth at all. He thinks she should have made him feel tough and capable and in control.

  No, it’s not that at all. But I know Cristobel, and just think yourself of the situation: here is a girl, not very bright or very confident, who has just found her father murdered in a peculiarly horrible manner; she is surrounded by nuts whom she cannot find very congenial or put any great trust in; along comes a brother, a policeman, whom she is fond of and who is (on the surface) pretty sure of himself and who ought to be a pillar of strength and reliability to her. You would expect her to be pleased, to feel a load off her mind—in short, to be relieved.

  Now, I think Chrissy was pleased to see me as a person. And yet . . . I pinned it down: I wasn’t convinced she was pleased to see me as a policeman.

  And that was odd, and thought-provoking, and disturbing.

  For some reason my mind went back to a talk I’d had with Cristobel ten years or so before. It was while I was still in the army, when I was thinking of going over to the CID. And it was four years after I had flung myself out of this house, shouting at my father that he was a dirty-minded, sadistic mediocrity. I was giving Chris lunch in London, and I could see that she was lonely and unhappy, and rather nauseated by my father’s tastes and habits. I urged her to get a job, but she resisted, and I could see that she was counting on the money from Father—such as it would be—to give her some kind of independence when he died. Anyway, I was a bit upset by her position in the house, and I actually suggested I try for a reconciliation with Father, so that I could visit her more often.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s at all possible,’ Cristobel had said. ‘He was deeply wounded.’

  ‘What, at my calling him a sadist?’

  ‘No. At your calling him a mediocrity.’

  Well, that figured. Or had seemed to at the time. Still, I recalled that conversation now, and wondered if Cristobel had ever wanted a reconciliation between me and the family. At times like this, you know, nasty thoughts even about the comparatively near and dear do occur to one.

  I put on pyjamas and went over to the desk, where my notebook lay, white and inviting. I opened the window: the night air outside was warm, even heavy. It was early autumn—season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Or of decay and death, if you are in that frame of mind. I sat at the great Victorian desk, big enough to store a couple of bodies in, drew my notebooks towards me and took up my pen.

  ‘Why that way?’ was the first thing I wrote.

  I’d told Joe that that was just the way one of my family would kill somebody, and I held by that. Still, almost any other way would have been quicker, cleaner, safer. Whoever did it must surely have been seen by my father to do it. And there was no guarantee that my father would not be heard, crying for help. I jotted down: ‘Lights on’. It was a spectacular but exceedingly dangerous way of getting rid of anybody, and it almost s
uggested that the method was part of the point—that the murder was some kind of appropriate revenge, some ghastly tit-for-tat affair.

  Which in its turn suggested some victim of my father’s peculiarly perverted mind.

  I next wrote: ‘Scissors? Knife? Where are they?’

  Whatever it was had been used, it was in effect the murder implement, and would have to be found, even if it brought us no closer to any particular individual. And that, to a practical policeman, immediately suggested an army of PCs swarming through the house. If a proper search of the house were to be made, let alone of the grounds, it would take days. Which would not please Aunt Sybilla. But perhaps I could suggest they search for the missing picture at the same time?

  I wrote. ‘Picture. Get description. Painter.’

  Then I wrote: ‘Financial situation. Not just Father’s. Lawrence’s. All the rest too.’

  That, surely, Tim Hamnet would do. I hoped Chrissy would be left fairly well off—a tidy sum would be only her just deserts. My father, though, when I knew him, was not careful with money, even though he had always hated to be swindled. He was the last person in the world to care whether anybody else would be well off or hard up after he died. Lawrence should be very comfortably off. With the house, in the male line, went a hell of a lot of money. But these days, none of the whacking fortunes were quite what they were. There had been inflation, the house itself must be a terrible millstone, there was Peter, who seemed to have no visible means of support. Day-to-day living in the house seemed much more frugal than in my time. Was Lawrence becoming miserly in his old age, as so frequently happened, or were there solid reasons for the frugality? At least the house—that is, Lawrence—had tremendous assets, of every kind.

  I wrote down: ‘Pictures. Worth how much?’

  The Times kept me informed of saleroom prices. Little-known Victorian painters were often fetching quite fantastic sums these days. Not to mention the moderns—and under Aunt Eliza’s supervision quite a lot of first-rate stuff had been bought for Harpenden in the ’twenties and ’thirties. Interesting.

  On the other hand, it was not immediately apparent how the financial state of the head of the family could have any bearing on the death of my father.

  I got up and walked around a bit. There was this to be said about Harpenden: it gave you room to move about. Hour by hour, in fact, I felt myself expanding. Space itself took on a new dimension, and I felt in a relation to things quite different from the one I was in in the little flat in Maida Vale, where the three of us lived. Thinking about us I thought about Daniel, and thinking about Daniel I (most unfairly) thought about the Squealies. There was the possibility that one of them (not all together, surely—I could not imagine all five of them moving through the house with murderous stealth) had crept over to the Gothic wing and snipped through the cord. This would argue, I thought, a certain mechanical aptitude, or that the Squealy in question had watched my father ‘at it’ before. Not impossible. The eldest Squealy was—what?—about ten. Still, I didn’t find it altogether probable. There was also the possibility that the murderer (or the Trethowans in general, closing ranks under attack, as was their wont) would put it about that that was what had happened. Even persuade one of the Squealies to confess. Though that might prove a highly dangerous course.

  But so would be the other possibility: persuading a Squealy to do it and instructing it how. Hideously dangerous. But perhaps not quite so dangerous if the persuader were one of its parents.

  It was just at this point in my perambulations about the great guest bedroom that I thought I heard something. I crossed to the window and stuck out my head: undoubtedly I had heard something, and what it was was sounds of fury, of altercation. And it wasn’t difficult to guess where they came from. I stuck my feet into slippers and quick as a flash I was out of the room, down the great staircase, and out of one of the back doors. I pulled the door to: McWatters had given me all the necessary keys, so I could get back in. I made off through the garden, finding to my pleasure that I knew every tree, every flower-bed. The air was warm and still, the garden a mass of looming, menacing shapes, the moon through the trees highlighting the nearly bare branches. The leaves on the ground were like a pillow under my slippered feet. I skulked towards the Elizabethan wing.

  The two wings on the back of the house were the Florentine wing (occupied by Sybilla and Mordred) and the Elizabethan (occupied by Peter and his brood). It required no great deductive genius to guess that if anyone was bawling their lungs out at twelve o’clock at night, it was likely to come from the Elizabethan wing. I darted from tree to tree, hugging the shade, shunning the moonlight. In no more than a couple of minutes I had landed up safe under an oak, hardly twenty feet from the lighted living-room window.

  And boy! they were really going at it. There was Pete, standing in a filthy old sweater and baggy trousers, his foot resting on a chair, his whisky glass in his hand. And there was Maria-Luisa, hands on her hips, if there were still hips under that great bulging front, tossing her head, bending forward to give point to her hisses of hatred and contempt—looking, in fact, for all the world like Anna Magnani in one of those post-war neo-realistic films. And they were really handing it out, both of them. She, louder and shriller, but he really with considerable expertise and relish. I had to hand it to him: he was holding his own, all right.

  As far as I could make out, of course. Because ninety per cent of all this was going on in Italian, which is really the only language to quarrel in. They made such good use of it that I don’t think I missed all that much, artistically, by not understanding: this wasn’t an exercise in logic. Still, as a policeman I would dearly like to have known what it was all about. Now and then Pete would let fly with a phrase or two in English: ‘You stupid bitch, you’ve got it wrong as usual’ was one; ‘Why don’t you fucking learn English, then you might understand what’s going on?’ was another. These were phrases principally for his own satisfaction: it was like shouting insults at a Lambretta. On and on she went, higher and higher, working herself up to a final orgasm of fury.

  I noticed, while this process was at a point of screw-turning tension, that her eye was suddenly caught by her own whisky glass standing on the table, and if Pete hadn’t been shouting so hard he might have noticed too. Advancing a step, she seized it in her capable kitchen hands and launched it with its contents straight at his head.

  ‘Bruto! Barbaro! Seduttore! Assassino!’

  It didn’t need even as much as holiday Italian to understand that last one, and to wonder whether it was part of Maria-Luisa’s normal repertoire of abuse, or a statement of fact or opinion.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE YOUNGER GENERATION

  I awoke on Friday morning to the sound of policemen in the house. The sound is quite unmistakable, at least to a policeman: heavy men trying to move discreetly. I poked my head round the bedroom door: hordes of them—down in the hall, up the staircase, on the landing. Hamnet was really intending to take the place apart.

  McWatters brought me breakfast on a tray, a substantial and traditional bacon-and-egg affair. He was too sensible to apologize to me for the infestation of policemen. I ate well, then I shaved and dressed and went to see what was going on. If the police were everywhere, the family was not: only Aunt Sybilla seemed to be around in the main part of the house. I expected her to be creating merry hell, but in fact she was sitting, robed and turbaned, in a small study off the hall, in pensive attitude, as if going through her Blue Period. I slipped in to have a word with Hamnet, and said I thought she was unusually quiet, given the circumstances.

  ‘Used it all up last night,’ said Tim in his phlegmatic way.

  ‘Bad?’

  ‘Incredible. Stood me out it was suicide, or accident, or possibly both. Said she was going to get on the phone to the Home Secretary who was a personal friend, but it turned out she was thinking of the last one but seven. But phew! I think she must be what they call a grande dame.’

  ‘She’d lik
e to think so,’ I said. ‘Did you get anything out of her in the end?’

  ‘Not a thing. As far as movements were concerned, she was in bed. No doubt they all were. As far as motive is concerned, she knew of nothing whatsoever. Everything was hunky-dory.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘Can you imagine this lot living together and everything being hunky-dory?’

  I told him about the hypothetically missing picture, suggested his searchers should keep their eyes open, pending more details, and then I drifted off into the grounds.

  My idea was that, since it was a fine day, the Squealies might be playing outside, and that I might detach one of the older ones and talk to it in an uncle-like fashion, and perhaps get things out of it that a policeman could not. A pretty fatuous idea, actually, because they did not know me as an uncle and I do look awfully like a policeman. And anyway, as Tim Hamnet found out later, they are only to be detached from one another by the strength of three men. In any case, they weren’t in the grounds—I would have heard them—but I wandered around for a bit, partly for old time’s sake, partly to see if anyone would spot me from the window and come out for a chat. I was just standing on the edge of a spinney down by the lake, now thick with weeds, when along came Mordred. I don’t know if he had seen me from the window, but he came purposefully, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, neat and dapper in a tailor-made suit, and looking as if he’d just washed behind both his ears, and felt all the better for it.

  ‘That’s the tree you fell out of when you were five,’ he said, pointing, ‘and that’s the lake you pushed me into when you were ten.’

  He was full of beans, and doing none of the House of the Dead stuff. Still, none of them were.

  ‘What a memory you have,’ I replied in kind. ‘I can see you’re the family historian.’

  ‘For my sins,’ he said with a wry grimace. ‘And until some academic job comes up in somewhere other than Qatar or Abu Dhabi. The damnable thing is, what with the general family publicity mania and now this, if I did ever get the thing finished it would probably be a bestseller. It would sell better than Pete’s magnum opus, anyway.’