‘Well, Peregrine, I gave all possible help last night to your nice friend from the Force.’
When Aunt Sybilla lies, she does so with total conviction, and when she is found out lying she can summon up a truly Pecksniffian self-righteous outrage.
‘I’m sure he’s grateful,’ I said.
‘I hope so. Have you seen the papers today?’
‘No,’ I shuddered. So this was the cause of the beam of sunlight that had brightened her morning.
‘Well, I got on to my friends in Fleet Street. Not all of them. Some of them had died!’ She said this in a tone of affront, as if they had deserted their posts. ‘As a result, there’s only a silly little piece in the Grub. But otherwise we’ve been done proud! They’ve given us a really good spread!’
‘Aunt Sybilla, do you think—?’
‘I shall give them further dribbles of information from time to time. And, of course, exclusive interviews when it’s over and the monster is caught. Who can it be, do you think, Perry? Who could wish to kill your father? A man without an enemy in the world. A verray parfit gentil knight, or the younger brother of one, at any rate.’
‘I’m afraid, Aunt Sybilla, you should face up to the fact that it’s most likely to have been someone in this house.’
‘Impossible! Unless it was a Squealy. I do think that’s a definite possibility. If it was, he’d be packed off to a Reformatory, wouldn’t he?’ Her face expressed delighted anticipation, but then it fell again. ‘Not that it would make much difference. They keep coming all the time.’
‘Did you want me for anything, Aunt Sybilla?’
‘Did I what? Oh, yes. I’ve told Mrs McWatters that you will lunch with Lawrence. He’s in good form today, thank heavens, so you should seize the chance. A good head-to-head, as the French say. Of course, we’d love to have had you ourselves. Mordred said especially to ask you because he really finds you quite interesting, but . . .’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’m looking forward to a talk with Uncle.’
‘Exactly. Get in while the going’s good. Because tomorrow he could have Gone Off, as it were.’
So that was that. I was doomed to lunch with the famous Survivor of the Trenches. (I never found out, by the way, whether my Uncle Lawrence ever did any actual fighting in the First World War, or whether he so much as saw a trench. He was not eighteen until July 1918, and he certainly didn’t lie about his age to get in early. Of course one could get killed as easily in the last days of the war as in the first, as Wilfred Owen found out, but malicious family rumour, fostered by my father, suggested that Lawrence’s closest view of the war, like Hemingway’s, was from the front end of a stretcher while serving in the Ambulance Corps. It was on leave in December 1918, in the euphoria of peace, that Lawrence met and married his first wife, a chorus girl.)
I went along to have a bit of a natter with Tim Hamnet. He had been interviewing Aunt Kate, and looked dazed. I told him about the paintings, and he sent a message through to his men to keep their eyes open for any rustic scene in liver-congealing greens, and any picture with Turkish overtones. We discussed the Squealy idea, which seemed to possess such attractions for the various adult occupants of the house: we weren’t really sold on the notion; though, as Tim said, there was something about the method of the murder which suggested a naughty child. To fill in the half-hour until lunch I went off and glanced at the papers. And then wished I hadn’t. FAMOUS FAMILY’S TORTURE CHAMBER shrieked one. TORTURE HORROR IN STATELY HOME yelled another. The stories were in kind, and I began to get rather angry until I suddenly decided that really you couldn’t blame the journalists: when they blew something up from nothing and persecuted inoffensive citizens—that’s when you should get angry. But this was hardly nothing, and it had been handed to them on a plate by publicity-crazed Sybilla. One would have to be a saint not to rub one’s hands a bit at a story like that, and Fleet Street seldom runs to saints.
Lunch was simple, mostly salad, and it was served by Mrs McWatters.
‘McWatters is in with the policemen, helping with Mrs Trethowan,’ she explained, and I couldn’t remotely think what she meant.
She was a stern-faced, rigid woman, the sort who look as if they go around singing ‘Their land brought forth frogs’ under their breath all day. I wondered how someone whose soul seemed to have been entered by the iron of Presbyterianism could bear to live day by day in the vicinity of the Trethowans.
Uncle Lawrence was in a little motorized chair, and he got himself into the room and up to the head of the table with a good deal of dexterity. On his good days he could easily do without Kate, which was worth remembering. On ground-floor level, anyway, he was as mobile as if he had the use of his legs. At least now he knew who I was, and he greeted me expansively.
‘Ah, Perry, m’boy. How are things? Sorry I wasn’t at m’best yesterday. These things happen at my age, y’know. They looking after you all right?’
‘Very well indeed, thank you.’
‘You’ll have to come more often, now your father’s gone, eh? See to—what’s her name?—Cristobel, now she’s on her own. I suppose she gets the loot, eh?’
‘I sincerely hope so, if there is any.’
‘What? If there is any? ’Course there is. Rolling. Must be. What did he have to spend it on, eh?’
‘Do-it-yourself strappado machines,’ I suggested.
Lawrence roared with laughter. ‘Dear me. Most unseemly. Brother’s going, and all that. Still. When you think of it: those that live by the sword shall perish by the sword, what? eh? Same principle.’
There was a dreadful cheeriness about Uncle Lawrence’s discussion of my father’s death that was hardly decent. After all, he could scarcely have disliked him as much as I did, otherwise he’d have booted him out of the house long ago. In the intervals of his wheezy chuckles he was tucking heartily into his meal. Salad wasn’t the easiest thing for a man partly paralyzed by a stroke to eat: he intently got a few bits of this and that on to his fork, then effortfully raised it to his mouth, the last few inches—past his oh-so-Bohemian cravat—being particularly painful. Still, he managed, and chatted on in his old way the meanwhile.
‘Have any contact with y’father, Perry, after you left?’
‘None whatsoever.’
‘No reconciliation, eh? What was the trouble?’
‘I believe he objected to my calling him a mediocrity.’
This delighted Lawrence. ‘Seriously? How splendid! Well, he wasn’t much, was he? Dried-out little talent, that’s about all you could call it. You’d’ve thought setting Swinburne might have inspired him, eh? chap like that. But it didn’t. At the end there was even less. It just trickled away and he wrote nothing. Too busy with his infernal machines, what?’
‘Did he have any—what shall I say?—accomplices in his special tastes? I mean —’ this was horribly awkward—‘he didn’t pay people to beat him, or anything?’
Lawrence guffawed again. ‘No, he was essentially a man of solitary vices.’ But he thought, and I think he perceived that the drift of my question might have led the search away from the occupants of Harpenden. ‘Mind you, I don’t know what he did when he went to London. You can get all sorts of people to do things for you there, what?—sort of thing you wouldn’t want to ask one of the gardeners to do. Soho’s still what it was, eh? And then there’s the little man who made his machines.’
‘Did he come here?’
‘Think so. Organized the installation and all that, don’t you know. Never saw him m’self.’
‘Did he go to London often?’
‘Not so much in recent years. Too damned expensive. Still, I imagine he still had contacts.’
‘You didn’t have any quarrel with him yourself?’
‘Quarrel? No. Didn’t like the man. Couldn’t be bothered to quarrel with him.’
‘You didn’t think he’d been taking pictures and selling them?’
‘That damnfool idea of Sybilla’s? No—nothing in it. Silly
buzzard gets these bees in her bonnet. Not that there’s not some valuable stuff in the house.’ He fumbled stiffly in his pockets. ‘Got a letter today. Some place or other in America. Philadelphia, that’s it. Some damn woman writing. Setting up some kind of museum of female art. Ever heard such nonsense, eh? Lot of rubbish they’ll have, eh? But they want some of Eliza’s stuff. Got one already, want more. Hmm. Think I’ll hold out on them for a bit. Make ’em more eager. They can’t have much stuff as good as hers.’
I had looked into Germaine Greer’s book on women painters and their wrongs, and remembering the dire assemblage of illustrations I could only agree. I didn’t know which would be worse, the collection of paintings, or the sort of person who would go and see it. Still, it was all rather interesting. I noted that Lawrence was far from ruling out the idea of selling.
‘There seems to be some idea going round,’ I said casually, ‘that one of Peter’s children might have cut the cord—completely in play, of course.’
That really set Uncle Lawrence off. Obviously no one had dared broach the idea to him before.
‘What? Whose idea was that? Absolute poppycock. Never heard such bilge in m’life. Little darlings! Have you ever seen such little sweetlings? Wouldn’t enter their heads, not for a moment. They like a bit of fun and games, but they’d never do a thing like that. You stamp firmly on any talk you hear. Absolute balderdash.’
‘I’m not madly keen on the idea myself,’ I said calmly.
But Lawrence had clearly been upset, and now began to toy fretfully with his ice-cream. He seemed to be getting tired, because there was little more in the way of conversation to be got out of him, and he sat there muttering ‘Poppycock’ and ‘nasty nonsense’ and things of that kind, making me feel the most utter louse even for mentioning it.
Luckily, after a bit Mrs McWatters appeared and came over to whisper in my ear: ‘The Inspector says, they’ve found the scissors, sir.’
‘What? Speak up! No secrets here. What’s that you’re saying?’ bellowed Uncle Lawrence.
‘The Inspector,’ said Mrs McWatters in a deep Clara-Butt-exhorting-Britain-to-rule-the-waves voice, ‘said to tell Mr Peregrine that the scissors have been found.’
‘Scissors? What does he want scissors for? I could have lent them a pair of scissors if they’d asked,’ said Uncle Lawrence.
CHAPTER 9
PAPA’S PAPERS
The finding of the scissors that had cut the thread of my papa’s destiny raised my spirits no end. It seemed to suggest—quite irrationally—that at last we might be getting somewhere, that before long there might be an end to this nightmare, and I might shake the dust of Harpenden House off my feet and head back to real life. Perhaps I wouldn’t even stay for the funeral: no one had asked me to it, after all, and I had only come under the sternest call of duty. Almost without realizing it, I burst into song as I made my way through the hall and down the corridor to the Gothic wing:
‘“Come down and redeem us from virtue,
Our lady of Pain.”’
‘Christ Almighty,’ said Tim Hamnet, meeting me at the door of our wing. ‘What’s that?’
‘A section of my father’s masterwork, the song-cycle Dolores,’ I said. ‘To words by Swinburne. It should be sung by a tenor, but it doesn’t make it sound any better. Come on, Tim, spill the beans. Where?’
‘Stuffed down the side of a flowerpot. The earth was only slightly disturbed—bit of luck our chap noticed it. A London copper probably wouldn’t have. I’ll show you.’ He led the way back to the hall, and then down the corridor leading (past numberless small, dark and totally useless rooms) to the Florentine wing. On an old, low occasional table was a pot containing the plant known as mother-in-law’s tongue. I raised the bladelike leaves gently, and looked at the place where the scissors had been pushed down.
‘Hmm. Interesting. What sort were they?’
‘Largish pair of nail-scissors. Sharp—very good quality—German-made. You don’t get that class of article from Sheffield these days. McWatters says they belonged in one of the downstairs bathrooms. I’ve sent them off to the boffins, but it’s pretty obvious they did the job, isn’t it?’
‘For the moment I can’t think of a hundred and one other reasons for stuffing a pair of nail-scissors down a flowerpot,’ I said. ‘Well, we’re a step or so for’arder. We can certainly knock on the head the idea that it was one of the Squealies having a bit of childish fun. They’d just have dropped the scissors, or put them back where they found them.’
‘Whereas anyone else—?’
‘Would, I guess, have seen that the scissors, if they belonged to the house, and if the forensic bods could prove that they cut the cord, would have brought the murder home irrevocably to one of the inhabitants. Or at the very best to someone who knew the house well.’
‘Your family have many friends these days, Perry?’
‘Friends in the area? I don’t get that impression. They don’t seem to have been deluged by phone-calls of sympathy. I’m not surprised. Can you imagine old Jack ‘Obbs from the village tottering up to have a natter about his rheumatiz with one of this lot? Of course, the McWatterses may have friends.’
‘Remarkable chap, that. Engaging, too.’
‘What on earth was he with you at lunchtime for? His better half—who is not engaging—said something about Mrs Trethowan. Sybilla calls herself Miss Trethowan these days, so I suppose she must have meant Maria-Luisa?’
‘Yes. He was translating.’
‘He was what?’
‘Translating. Unorthodox, but since they didn’t seem to be able to get anybody locally, and thinking of the time it would take to get someone from London, I decided to take the risk. She obviously had enough English to protest if he misrepresented what she said. Just won’t speak it, the lazy bitch.’
‘And how come the Admirable Crichton is fluent in gutter Italian?’
‘War service, so he said.’
I calculated. ‘The war’s been over thirty-five years or so. That makes McWatters at least fifty-five. I’d have put him five or ten years younger myself, but he is sort of ageless. The quiet, withdrawn type that time doesn’t line. Still, his wife looks all of mid-fifty, so I suppose it’s probably true. Interesting in the circumstances, I must say. Did you get anything out of Maria-Luisa?’
‘Protestations of the innocence of her infants, swearings to God and the Holy Virgin that they were locked in, maledictions—I learned the word maledetto without any trouble—on those who tried to pin such an atrocious crime on her innocent angels. Nothing of any substance, in other words.’
‘Predictable, I suppose. Still, a bit more engaging than their ghastly father, whose first thought was to shop them for the crime.’
‘Doing anything this afternoon, Perry?’ said Tim. ‘If not, I’ve got a job for you.’
‘Interviewing the Squealies or something dangerous like that, I suppose? I think you should call in the Specials.’
‘Actually, I’m doing that myself, with assistance. No, I’d like you to go upstairs into your father’s quarters and go through all his papers and things. You know your way around up there, know where he kept all his stuff, I imagine, and it’s possible you might come across something we might pass over.’
‘I suppose I could. What am I looking for?’
‘Well, obviously anything that could have caused trouble between your father and the family. Money, those pictures, anything of that sort. And possibly anything connected with his nasty little sexual practices. The person who made the machines, any pals with similar tastes—I’d like to know about them. Do you think he had contacts with others of his kind?’
‘For all I know they held a von Sacher-Masoch memorial dinner once a year at the Savoy,’ I said. ‘Or else they got my Aunt Kate to cook one for them. Actually, that’s what put me in mind of that song . . .’
‘What song?’
‘“When thy lips had such lovers to flatter;
When the city lay
red from thy rods,”’
I bellowed.
‘Don’t do that, Perry, please.’
‘That song-cycle Dolores. I wondered whether it wasn’t some sort of covert announcement—of his tastes, I mean, and an appeal to others of his kind to make contact. It makes it pretty bloody obvious. On the other hand, Uncle Lawrence said not: implied it was very much a solitary thing with my papa.’
‘Well, keep it in mind while you’re looking around, eh, Perry?’
And so I climbed the stairs and at last went back to my childhood home. I can’t describe the sensations I had: for minutes on end I just pushed open doors and wandered through the old rooms—so well remembered, and hardly changed. The drawing-room, my mother’s little sitting-room, my father’s library and study, my cosy round bedroom in the turret, and Cristobel’s room just beside it. I imagine everybody going home after a long time away feels a bit like me. But I suppose most of them have a lot of happy memories. It wasn’t that I had none; on the other hand, it wasn’t those that came back to me. The oddest thing of all was that, though my father and Cristobel had lived here alone for fifteen years, it wasn’t their presence I felt here at all: it was my mother’s, investing every room with memories: I came upon her as I turned corners, I saw her back as she sat at her writing-desk, I imagined her lying on the sofa with a rug over her, I heard her thin voice calling to me. My mother—whom I’d barely thought of twice a year since I’d grown up and left home.
I think my mother was a sort of survival, one of a species that could not fend for itself in the modern world but had clung precariously on in tiny numbers. I suppose you’d call her well born: she came of a very old Cumberland family with a splendid pedigree and lots of in-breeding. My mother drifted through life—thin, Roman-nosed, kind and remote—with not a thought of how to grapple with realities or fight battles for herself. Things were done for one, weren’t they? It was an odd world she lived in—one where she had family, ‘birth’, a place in society, appointed duties, the respect of the peasantry. Even in Jane Austen’s time such people ought to have known the world was changing; my mother never seemed to learn. My father proposed. She was thirty and unmarried. Her family was hard up, as an old family always is that has not sent representatives into the big worlds of banking and commerce and industry. They told her she should accept, and she accepted, drifting into marriage as she had drifted into everything else she had done in life.
Death by Sheer Torture Page 8
