Death by Sheer Torture

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Pete writes, does he?’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘What on?’

  ‘Let him bore you with it. He’ll be delighted. I hear your wife’s coming tonight.’

  ‘Now, how in God’s name—?’

  ‘Calm down. I haven’t been listening in to your calls. I heard at the Marquis of Danby when I slipped down for a double Scotch last night. I can see why you don’t want them here, but do bring her up for a meal, won’t you?’

  ‘If she sets her mind on it, I don’t see how I can stop her,’ I said gloomily. ‘Short of its being one of Aunt Kate’s nights.’

  ‘She was on on Wednesday. It’ll be another ten days before she’s on again. With a bit of luck even you will avoid her spinach blancmange.’

  ‘How do you stand it?’ I asked.

  ‘You mean the family in general, I take it, rather than the spinach blancmange?’ He considered for a moment—really, I thought, he is quite nice, and not unintelligent. ‘Well, I suppose the brute fact of the matter is that it’s better than teaching. Teaching in an ordinary school, I mean. Almost anything is better than that. So long as I’m part of the great army of the unemployed I can stand it here. I’m used to my Mama’s little ways, and as for the rest—well, they must appear appalling to you because you’ve been so long away, but I find I can put up with them.’

  ‘I hear you’re looking into this notion your mother has got that a picture has disappeared from the house.’

  He raised his eyebrows to heaven. ‘Just what I was going to have a chat to you about last night. If it was only one picture, though . . .’

  ‘She thinks a lot have gone?’

  ‘Once she got the idea, she started thinking of things she’d known as a child—pictures, furniture, Great-Grandfather Josiah’s christening spoon, God knows what. Then she’d scream they were missing, cry blue murder—and then of course she’d find them and go quiet. On the Rampage and Off the Rampage, as Joe Gargery says. Personally I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘You mean not everything’s been found?’

  ‘No, alas: we’d get some peace if it had been. Of course, stuff gets lost, furniture breaks, things get given away. But certainly there seem to be things missing.’

  ‘What picture was it that set all this off?’

  ‘It was a thing by Holman Hunt, called The Rustic Wedding. A sort of companion piece to The Hireling Shepherd.’ I shuddered. ‘Yes, indeed. I remember it dimly from childhood, and it too has greens that sear the eyeballs. Which makes it odder that it can’t be found. Likewise a picture by William Allan entitled Lord Byron Reposing in the House of a Turkish Fisherman After Having Swum the Hellespont.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘Exactly. But if I remember it rightly, it’s not something you could just tuck away somewhere.’

  ‘But you remember it framed.’

  ‘True. That’s a point. Anyway, the fact is that these, at least, seem to be gone. Then there are Aunt Eliza’s—that’s another problem. Nice old thing, as I remember her, but not the most methodical of women, and her will, I hear, was a mess. Who owns the ones that are here, were there more here when she died? The fact is, I agree there should be a proper inventory made. Because the security in the house is far from impressive, and it could be that any one of us is taking them off and popping them, one by one. As my dear mother, in her nice way, made us all very much aware.’

  ‘I gather it was suggested a professional might do the inventory.’

  ‘Exactly. Your papa’s bright contribution. Now, the advantage of this suggestion—you don’t mind if I abuse your papa, do you?’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  ‘Well, the advantage of this suggestion was that it looked as if your papa was keen to get the job done properly and insisting it be done by an outsider. And it is work for an expert, not for a dilettante like me. But the fact is, the expert could only deal with what is here now. He wouldn’t know a thing about what should be here but isn’t. So the proposal, to my ears, smelt just the tiniest bit fishy.’

  ‘I see your point. Or it could have been pure mischief-making.’

  ‘Of which your late papa knew a thing or two. Precisely. Anyway I did a bit of work on it, from the family papers and that, but by then it had all begun to die down and I dropped it. I might have done more if Uncle Lawrence had been willing to pay me, but that would have been out of the question, knowing the dear old phoney.’

  ‘Are the family finances rocky?’

  Mordred turned his eyes in the direction of the horizon: we could see Thornwick in the distance, and some prosperous housing estates of a private kind in between.

  ‘I don’t see how they can be, do you? It’s all ours, all that. Still ours. Lawrence should be bathing in the stuff.’

  ‘That’s not quite the impression given.’

  ‘You noticed the inclination to pinch the odd penny, did you?’

  ‘I never expected supermarket sherry in this house.’

  ‘Precisely. Though we’re all good children and say we prefer it. If you’d like a guess at the reason for all this, I’d say it’s because he hasn’t been able to bring himself to make the house and all the doings over to Pete.’

  ‘Of course!’ I said. ‘So the death duties —’

  ‘Will be colossal. The only time I ever remember the subject coming up, he muttered: “Heed the Bard. Remember King Lear.” I suppose he foresees himself being turned out into a Corporation old people’s home—our modern equivalent of the heath. I imagine he’s penny-pinching in anticipation of death duties—though that doesn’t quite make sense either, unless he’s salting it away somewhere secret. The fact is, Uncle Lawrence is only passing fond of Peter, but he absolutely dotes on the Squealies.’

  ‘So I noticed. He’s totally senile, I take it.’

  ‘Only so-so. He can tell a hawk from a handsaw when the wind’s southerly. Anyway, the fact is, it could be Lawrence putting the pictures up for sale, as is his perfect right.’

  ‘And being too embarrassed to say?’

  ‘Exactly. So what you’ve got here is either a fine old can of worms, or conceivably a storm in a teacup.

  ‘Had all this caused much trouble—for example, between my father and Uncle Lawrence?’

  ‘Not that I noticed. There was no more than the normal quota of sniping, heavy ironies, double-edged innuendoes and so on—the usual currency of communication in this house.’

  We had been walking through the golden trees, under falling leaves, and we now arrived back at the lawn behind the house. Mordred paused in the shade of a tree.

  ‘See that window in the Elizabethan wing?’ he said. ‘That’s Peter’s sitting-room.’

  ‘I know. I spied on him last night. I saw Maria-Luisa clock him with a whisky glass.’

  ‘Good for her. Now, in that window is my cousin—our cousin—Pete. And I bet you anything you like that if you walk across this lawn alone he will call you in and pump you for all you’re worth.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know Cousin Pete. Inheritor of Harpenden House, and future head of the Trethowan family.’

  He started off in the direction of the Florentine wing, but I caught his arm and kept him a moment longer in the shadow.

  ‘Morrie—if my wife comes here, can I rely on you?’

  ‘What? To see they all behave themselves?’

  ‘No—to make sure they don’t. I want her to see them at their worst. I couldn’t bear a big reconciliation, with family visits in the summer hols.’

  ‘I’ll do my best, but I should hardly think it will be necessary. With nerves all tensed up as they are now, anything can happen.’

  With which prophecy of ferment Morrie trotted off happily in the direction of the Florentine wing—his tie as straight as when he had emerged, his shoes as spick and dust-free. There are some men nature can’t touch.

  But he was dead right about Pete. Because I was just strolling, oh so casual, in the direction of the ma
in block, when he appeared in his sitting-room window.

  ‘Oh, I say, Perry—’ I turned coolly. ‘I say, are you at leisure, or on the beat, as it were?’

  ‘Pretty much at leisure,’ I said.

  ‘Could I have a word with you, old man? Nothing frightfully important, but —’

  I strolled over to him. ‘But—?’

  ‘But . . . I’d just like a word,’ he concluded feebly. He was in that denim suit again, which made him look ten years older than his real age. Have you noticed it’s only aging phoneys who wear denim suits? Well, it is, exclusively. This phoney had a bad bruise over his left eye, and I asked with concern: ‘Been in an accident?’

  ‘My marriage is one long accident,’ said Pete gloomily. The sound of the Squealies, playfully scalping each other several floors up, lent point to his remark. ‘I say, I’ll come round to the side door and let you in.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ I said, easing myself up on to the window ledge and swivelling my legs round into the room.

  ‘Maria-Luisa’s all het up about security. Every door locked, and bolts on the one through to the main house. Crazy bitch. That’s what comes of being born and bred among the Mafia.’

  Peter and Maria-Luisa’s sitting-room was a fairly comfortable affair, with a lot of ’thirties furniture retrieved from the main house, or perhaps left in this wing by Aunt Eliza. There was no great impress of personality on the room, however, unless it was the untidy scattering of books and papers around the place, which could have been strewn for my benefit.

  ‘Excuse the mess,’ said Peter perfunctorily. ‘This is the overflow from my study.’

  ‘I hear you write,’ I said. (I would never have dreamt, by the way, of giving him an opening like that if it wasn’t that I knew I had to find out something about him and his life.)

  ‘Mmmm,’ said Peter. ‘At the moment I’m reviewing. A load of sex books, for the New Spectator.’ He gestured towards the sofa, where lay a disorder of books, among them such surefire American best-sellers as Sex and the Stock-Market by Theodore S. Rosenheim and Is There Sex After Death? by Dr Philip Krumm-Kumfitt.

  ‘I’m pretty much the New Spectator’s sex man these days,’ said Peter contentedly.

  ‘Really?’ (Well, you think of a reply to that.)

  ‘What with that and the novel, I’ve got my hands full,’ he went on, with killing casualness.

  ‘Novel?’ I said, playing my part like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  ‘Ye-e-es,’ said Peter, as if reluctant to speak of it, but since I’d brought the topic up . . . ‘A really big one, something on the scale of the old three-volume affairs.’

  ‘Have you got far with it?’

  ‘Oh, so-so.’ He gestured with his hands, as if to indicate a thick pile. ‘I write reams and discard a lot. Discard the whole time. I’m a perfectionist.’

  ‘What . . . sort of thing is it?’

  ‘Well, you know, novels today are all niminy-piminy little affairs, written by housewives between the nappy-changes, or academics in their summer hols. God! British novels these days are so unambitious! They’re positively anaemic.’

  ‘Yours will have blood, will it?’

  ‘I see it as a sort of sexual odyssey, if you see what I mean, combined . . . combined with an enormous social conspectus, a sort of diagnosis of current social ills, get what I mean? Bleak House was the model I had in mind.’

  ‘I should have thought Nightmare Abbey might be a more appropriate model for someone living at Harpenden,’ I said.

  He looked at me closely. ‘You don’t like us very much, do you, Perry?’

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I only meant this house can’t be the most peaceful place for a writer to work in.’

  Peter wagged a fat finger at me. ‘It’s having the leisure that counts, it’s not being a part-time writer. It’s only the old upper classes—the remnants of the upper classes—that have the time to conceive anything really big these days. Look at your father —’

  ‘He never conceived anything bigger than a musical fart in his whole life,’ I protested.

  ‘Well, he was a bit different,’ Pete admitted. ‘What I meant was, he had leisure. He could wait on inspiration.’

  ‘He certainly waited,’ I agreed. ‘What was it you wanted to talk to me about, Pete?’

  This chat was not going very well, and I wasn’t helping it to go any better. Wasn’t I supposed to be worming my way into their confidences? Hearing their artless, gushing confessions? I was hardly going to succeed in that if I made it so abundantly plain I couldn’t stand any man-jack of them. And my direct question had very obviously embarrassed Pete, who had clearly intended to come round to this topic via several B-roads, public footpaths and back alleys.

  ‘I just wondered . . .’ he muttered, ‘. . . you know . . . how the police were . . . regarding the case. How it was going . . . Whether they were getting any leads.’

  ‘You’ll no doubt have a chance to ask Superintendent Hamnet that yourself before long.’

  ‘Well, yes, that’s partly the point . . . You’re the expert, Perry. I was wondering how to approach that . . . interview. Wondering what line I should take.’

  I raised my eyebrows. This really took the biscuit. What could one do but take refuge in cliché? ‘What can you expect me to say but that you should tell the truth?’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Perry. Don’t be so bloody Dixon of Dock Green. There’s truth and truth. Now, take this suggestion that one of my kids may have done it.’

  ‘Ah! Whose suggestion is that?’

  ‘Oh, it’s . . . going around. Now, what line am I supposed to take on that, for example?’

  He grinned, as if somehow he’d made a point I was incapable of seeing. ‘You don’t have to take any line,’ I said, exasperated. ‘All he’ll want to know is whether it could have happened. Could they have got out of this wing, for example?’

  ‘We usually lock them in their bedrooms,’ said Peter. ‘On the other hand, we sometimes forget.’

  ‘Did you forget the night before last?’

  ‘How should I remember? It was chaos that night. The suggestion hadn’t come up then.’

  ‘And Maria-Luisa? Does she remember?’

  ‘Oh, she’ll swear herself black and blue it was locked. She’d do that if everyone else had heard them rampaging through the house. Perjury isn’t a crime in Sicily: it’s a family duty.’

  ‘There probably wouldn’t be any question of perjury. The case could hardly come to court. They’re obviously too young to know what they’re doing.’

  ‘That’s rather what I thought,’ said Pete speculatively.

  ‘Unless, of course,’ I proceeded weightily, ‘someone put them up to it.’

  Pete darted a sharp glance at me. ‘Oh, come off it. You’ve seen my kids. Can you imagine them doing something they’d been put up to?’

  I spread out my hands. ‘Perhaps. If the idea appealed to them. If they thought it was fun. It might depend on their relationship with whoever it was.’

  ‘Meaning me or Maria-Luisa, no doubt. Hmmm. Yes, well I can see there are dangers in that line.’

  ‘Why,’ I asked nastily, ‘are you trying to take a line? What are you trying to cover up?’

  ‘I’m not trying to cover anything up, I’m just trying to get the whole silly business over and done with.’ He bent forward in his chair opposite me, in a gesture of intimacy I shrank back from. ‘Look, Perry: you know what your father was. He was an insignificant little troublemaker without an ounce of talent. I’m not particularly happy he’s been done in,’ (he said this rather quickly, as if he realized he was laying himself open) ‘but I’m not going to pretend I care a button either. Even if it was, say, McWatters or Mrs Mac. They do a good job, and we couldn’t cope if we lost them. If admitting one of the kids might have done it—and they might have—will get us back to normal so that I can get on with some work, then so be it. I still might, if you forget this daft idea they might have been put up to
it, and if I can knock some sense into their silly cow of a mother. You know us, Perry. You can’t expect any conventional law and order stuff in this house.’

  ‘Even if it means leaving a murderer at large among you?’

  ‘I can take care of myself,’ he said, puffing out some flab.

  ‘Well,’ I said, getting up, ‘you’re obviously going to take your own way, whatever I advise. But I’ll tell you one thing: if it was one of your children, doing it in a spirit of youthful fun, you can be pretty sure Hamnet will find it out.’

  ‘Will he interview them?’ said Pete admiringly. ‘Christ, I wouldn’t be in his shoes.’

  ‘Obviously he’ll have to, since this has come up. I’m sure he’ll know the best way to deal with them.’

  Pete narrowed his eyes: ‘What do you mean by that? I know you police: he’ll try and bully them into saying one of us put them up to it. I tell you, if he lays a finger on one of them, I’ll get my lawyer on to him and have him up for assault.’

  ‘Good to know you think the law has its uses,’ I said, vaulting out of the window.

  And I walked back to the main block, happily chewing over the notion that Pete was willing to dub one of his own kids in, if it would win him a bit of peace and quiet. Which no doubt was what the quarrel was about last night. All things considered, I thought my cousin Pete was as nasty a specimen of humanity as I had met in years of treating with the criminal classes, and it was good to know that the Trethowan estates were to go to such a worthy inheritor.

  CHAPTER 8

  LUNCH WITH UNCLE LAWRENCE

  When I went back into the house, Aunt Sybilla called me into the dark little study off the entrance hall, once, I believe, my grandfather’s business room where he dealt with all the estate accounts, now a rather unattractive writing-room. I doubted whether much writing went on there as a general rule, and was quite sure Aunt Sybilla had spent the morning in it because it gave her a good view on to the hall, and hence on to the comings and goings in the house as a whole. Something seemed to have happened to put her into a better humour than when I saw her earlier.