Death by Sheer Torture

by Robert Barnard

  ‘What?’

  ‘They went walking together—a long tour round the grounds. Well, Leo walking, Lawrence being wheeled. Can you imagine your father wheeling that chair? He never did it. Not his style at all. But he had to do it, because it was the only way they could be alone. So they could row.’

  It made sense. ‘Did it happen often?’

  ‘Just once since the stroke. About ten days ago. I’d’ve trailed them if I’d known. I used to be a marvellous tracker! Put on weight a bit since, but I bet the twigs wouldn’t crack under me!’

  ‘You’ve no idea what it could be about?’

  ‘Not a notion. Chrissy, perhaps?’ She looked at me in a sideways way to see if I knew, and was disappointed when she saw I did.

  ‘I see you’ve noticed, Aunt Kate.’

  ‘’Course I’ve noticed. Got eyes. Saw it start. Saw what they were up to. Glances across the table. Footsy. Trotting off to the summerhouse.’

  ‘Did you discuss it with anyone?’

  ‘’Course I didn’t. Kept it to m’self. Silly gel, though. Got no pride.’

  ‘It’s going to be difficult for her, though, Aunt Kate. She may need a bit of support.’

  ‘I’ll support her. Can’t blame a girl for going off the rails once in a while. Drive you a bit potty, looking after a little squirt like Leo all day long. I know. I did it for my father. And he was nice.’

  ‘Cristobel says it was our mother who charged her to look after Father. I don’t see how it could be . . .’

  ‘’Course it was. Cristobel got this letter thing.’

  ‘Ah! She did, then.’

  ‘That’s right. You know, sent by the lawyers, marked “to be opened when she is twenty-one” or something like that. Bit soppy of Virginia, I thought. Old-fashioned. But then she was. Anyway, your mother—God rest her soul, because she was a good woman, Perry, I don’t mean to speak against her—said she should regard her father as a sacred charge. I couldn’t see Leo as the Ark of the Covenant m’self, but you know Chrissy. Went around for days after she got it, telling everybody about it.’

  ‘Was there anything else in it?’

  ‘Lot of guff. Embarrassing. About a mother’s love. You know. People shouldn’t write stuff like that. When you’re gone, you’re gone. Nobody gives a damn what you say. Look at Franco!’

  ‘It’s odd she should write a letter like that to Cristobel, but not one to me.’

  ‘Post Office’s gone all to pot these days,’ said Kate, who seemed a bit distracted. ‘I say, more wine?’

  Blessedly she bore my glass to the kitchen, and I had recourse again to my bag, at the same time managing to extract from my mouth something that seemed to be nutty fudge. Look, I won’t tell you anything more about that damned risotto. I don’t want to be accused of writing gastronomic pornography.

  I wasn’t willing to let the subject of the letter drop, so when Kate came back waving another bumper of parsnip wine (the only good thing about which was that it did not taste of parsnip), I said: ‘I wonder if my mother did send me a letter. And I wonder what happened to it.’

  ‘’Spect Leo destroyed it,’ said Kate cheerfully. ‘Lawyers probably sent it here. I can just see him. Probably read it over, smiled his nasty little smile, tore it up and put it in the fire. Bet that’s what he did.’

  Yes, I could see him too. Except for that little note in his drawer. I said: ‘But if he were to hide it . . .’

  ‘Plenty of room to hide it,’ said Kate, in the understatement of the year. ‘But I think he’d destroy it, unless it contained something important. He hated you, you know, Perry!’

  ‘Yes, I think he did,’ I agreed. ‘I wondered at one point whether Cristobel wasn’t exaggerating, but I think it must have been true. All because I called him a mediocrity!’

  ‘That’s the one thing none of them will admit!’ said Kate. ‘Got to be plumped up the whole time. Like cushions. Calling him a mediocrity was worse than hitting him. He hated you, I tell you. He certainly wouldn’t have put a postage stamp on a letter from your mother to you.’

  ‘Yes, I see that. Nevertheless, I do think he kept it. If only I knew where. Or, for that matter, why.’

  ‘’Course, he was a secretive little man,’ said Kate. ‘If he thought he could use it . . . Against you, for instance. Silly old Sybilla says he wasn’t secretive because he was always boasting about those torture games he played. But he was. He liked gloating over things—having knowledge, enjoying the thought of what he knew. Crackers, if you ask me. Dangerous.’

  ‘So it seems. Still, if it was something that concerned me, that was surely no reason for killing him. Do you think he was the one to pinch the pictures, Aunt Kate?’

  ‘Leo? No. Not the type. No gloaty fun in that. Too risky, too.’

  ‘Who do you think it was?’

  ‘I think old Lawrence popped them himself. Stashed the money away somewhere the Inland Revenue won’t find it. For the Squealies. Or else it was Peter, and Lawrence is covering up for him. Or McWatters.’

  ‘That’s three,’ I pointed out. ‘Which do you really think took them?’

  ‘McWatters knows Iti,’ said Kate. ‘Bit suspicious, what? Ever heard of a butler who knew Iti before? Must be an art buff, or something.’

  ‘How did you know that he knows Italian, by the way, Aunt? Is he open about it? Did you all know?’

  ‘Don’t suppose the rest knew. Not interested, except in keeping him. I get around the house a bit. Trailing. Heard him talking one evening to Mrs Mac. Maria-Luisa had been shouting insults at us over dinner. Does that periodically. Comes from the gutter. Scum. Untermensch. Anyway, old McWatters heard ’em all, and was translating them to his missus. Singed my hair, I can tell you!’

  ‘So you’d pick McWatters—getting in with the household and progressively robbing it of pictures?’

  ‘Makes sense. Rather have that than one of the family.’

  I sighed. That was no argument. Aunt Kate was not the logical thinker of the family. I put down my fork with every appearance of regret, leaving a little mountain of food as if I thought it the polite thing to do, and stood up.

  ‘Well, I’d better be getting back to work, Aunt Kate,’ I said.

  Unluckily her eyes were on the level with my waist, and she peered disapprovingly at the bulge in my trousers.

  ‘Shouldn’t stuff things in your pockets like that, Perry,’ she said. ‘You young people don’t know how to treat good clothes!’

  ‘Er, is there anything else, Aunt Kate?’ I said hurriedly, ‘anything else you would like to tell me?’

  She was still chomping away, unwilling to miss a mouthful, but she became pensive and finally she said: ‘Don’t know if you realize how much we hated Leo. Well, we did. We didn’t have rows with him, but we all hated him. He got to our weak points and he twisted the knife in. We’re all failures in a way, him most of all. But he made us all feel it. He made us squirm.’

  ‘He certainly made me squirm.’

  ‘You were just a boy. It’s different when you’re old. Worse. He was a man who would have hated to be loved. Because he couldn’t love. Think of your poor mother. He despised her. Ignored her. Even you children. He hadn’t an ounce of feeling for you. And you were a lovely little boy, Perry! Golly, you were nice!’

  I blushed purple.

  ‘But he hated you by the end, and he’d have done anything to spite you. He tolerated Chris because she looked after him, but he despised her too, and he’d have made her life hell when he found out about the baby. He was a horrible little twerp, Perry! You can’t expect any of us to feel sorry he’s gone.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘Even Chris, I don’t think —’

  ‘Oh, Chris, underneath, doesn’t care. And she’ll have the baby now. It’ll be better for her, you know, when she has that to look after.’

  ‘I know. But I wish she could have been married. Chris is the sort that ought to get married. And it’ll be much worse with him in the same house. That I do
feel bitter about. Of course I know things aren’t easy for him either. Without a proper job, and no outlets . . .’

  Aunt Kate let out a great whoop of laughter. ‘No outlets!’

  ‘Well, I don’t imagine Morrie has a wildly exciting sex life, stuck here in Harpenden —’

  ‘Oh Perry, you are a chump! It’s not Morrie, it’s Pete!’

  CHAPTER 13

  IN WHICH I HAVE AN IDEA

  Chump was as good a word as any for it. I had been the most complete and utter chump. I had remembered Cristobel’s expressions of sympathy for Morrie and jumped obediently to the wrong conclusion. I would have done better to ask myself whose name Cristobel didn’t mention once during the course of that first interview: Peter’s. And what really got me as I strode through the house and up to my bedroom was that when I had talked to her a couple of hours before she had known I had fixed on Morrie as the father, and she’d let me go on thinking it. Worse, I had the feeling that she’d been playing with me, like an angler with a big and not very bright fish, ever since I arrived. We had been too dismissive of Cristobel’s intellect. She clearly had depths of animal cunning I had never hitherto plumbed.

  What was still more worrying was the feeling that she was quite simply holding back on me. That she knew something she was not telling. Knew what had been going on in this house, but for some reason or other—and I could think of some—was keeping mum. I didn’t like that. It was foolish, it was unsisterly, it was dangerous. One thing I was quite sure of: there had been a letter to me, and Chris knew about it. Why else hold back on the subject of her own letter from our mother? Something she had, according to Kate, burbled on about quite happily at the time she received it. The fact was, she must only recently have found out about my letter. Somehow found it and read it. And my letter, from Chris’s point of view, was obviously a hot potato.

  When I got to my stateroom, I flushed the little pile of risotto from my bag down the lavatory, and cleaned my teeth vigorously to get the taste of Aunt Kate’s efforts out of my mouth. Then I went over to the desk, to the notebooks that had been sitting there since the night I arrived, and I scrawled ‘Peter, Peter, Peter—damn him!’ all over a new blank page. That relieved my feelings a bit. I sat down with the intention of being more rational, and I wrote: ‘Pregnancy—significant, or just carelessness?’ And then I asked: ‘Did Cristobel tell Father?’

  But no train of thought could bring Cristobel’s pregnancy from being a side issue to occupying the centre of the stage. I could not see how the answer to the murder could lie there. I was just about to put down a query on the baffling subject of the letter and its whereabouts when I glanced out of the window and saw Jan and Daniel being shown around the grounds by Sybilla and Mordred. They were near the tree where two nights before I had stood watching Maria-Luisa launch her marital missile, and they started off down towards the lake. Well, it was a lovely afternoon, and the fact is, I couldn’t resist. Damn the case, I thought: they’re my family. (Ignoring the fact that so was the case.) I went out to them.

  Daniel—we seldom call him Dan, by the way, because Jan and Dan sounds like some ghastly cartoon film, with people who talk in funny voices—Daniel was capering around, beside himself with delight. The Trethowans went tremendously up in his estimation for owning such an enormous expanse of ground. And I could see his point. It was a pretty good feeling to know you could get all the exercise you could possibly need without danger from cars or muggers, and without passing beyond the confines of your own domain.

  ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ Daniel screamed as I came up. ‘I can run for miles and miles and not have to turn round!’

  And he suited action to words. I strolled up to the little sightseeing party—Jan all modest and a-watch, like Elizabeth Bennet being shown over Pemberley—and I greeted the others and put my arm around Jan.

  ‘He loves the space,’ she said.

  ‘Children do,’ said Sybilla.

  ‘You like space too, Perry,’ said Jan.

  ‘Of course he does,’ said Sybilla. ‘He grew up here.’

  I was beginning to get a nasty feeling of being accepted back in the fold.

  ‘Don’t the Squealies ever get out into the open?’ I asked.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Sybilla, with a downward curve of her discontented mouth. ‘Sometimes they’re locked in the tennis court. But the eldest are beginning to be able to climb the fence. Today they’re all at the dentist.’

  ‘Poor things!’ I said. ‘I mean the dental people.’

  ‘They have to go to a new one each time. They’re known over a wide radius, and they’re having to be taken further and further afield. Luckily their mother cuts their hair herself. Now this, Jan, is the lake.’ (I have commented before on Sybilla’s capacity to state the obvious.) ‘This is the lake Perry threw Mordred into in the year ’fifty-eight. It was over there . . .’

  As Sybilla seemed about to expatiate on this not-very-interesting topic, and still seemed to nurse a motherly sense of outrage, I took Morrie aside.

  ‘Mordred, I’m sorry —’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Perry. It was twenty years ago.’

  ‘Not for throwing you in, you ass. Since I was ten and you were sixteen I’m rather proud of it. For snapping at you this morning. The fact is, I’d got the idea that you’d done something, and now I find you hadn’t.’

  ‘Oh? Denuding the family picture collection?’

  ‘No—making my sister pregnant.’

  ‘Is she pregnant? That would be Pete.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said grimly. ‘That would be Pete. Did they make it that obvious?’

  ‘Not at all. At least, I never noticed anything. It’s just that it’s the sort of thing he does. Getting people pregnant makes him feel good.’

  ‘Well, if he must scatter his maker’s image through the land, I wish he wouldn’t do it via my sister,’ I said. ‘It makes me puke. It’s worse than when I thought it was you. Quite apart from anything else, what’s Maria-Luisa going to do when she finds out?’

  ‘Hmmm. If I were Chris I certainly would avoid coming to dinner on the nights when she’s cooking what my mama calls her delicious Mediterranean specialities. Though in point of fact it’s not the first time our little Neapolitan child of nature has had to face news of that kind.’

  ‘Really? Who else?’

  ‘Oh, there was the wife of a filthy-rich Yorkshire industrialist. Then there was the literary editor of the New Spectator.’

  ‘So that’s how he got the job. Interesting variant on the old-fashioned interview.’

  ‘He likes the sort who are not likely to sue for maintenance. None of your barmaids or local peasant wenches for Pete. He’s very calculating where he dips his wick.’

  ‘Peregrine! Mordred!’ came the vulturine voice of Aunt Sybilla. ‘What are you so deep in converse over? I will not be left out, Peregrine. Tell me all. Have you found those pictures?’

  We were at the far edge of the lake, not far from the summerhouse. We stopped, like tourists, to look back at that monstrous house, that heavy load of architectural pretension burdening the strong back of Northumberland.

  ‘Well, actually, yes, Aunt Sybilla,’ I said. ‘We’ve found the Lord Byron, anyway. It’s been . . . at any rate acquired, probably bought, by Newstead Abbey.’

  Sybilla was ecstatic. ‘You see! You hear that, Mordred? I was right. You’ve all been mocking me, saying things weren’t really missing —’

  ‘Half of them were found, Mother dear,’ said Mordred.

  ‘Put back! I was right all along. Somebody is dissipating the family heritage. Peregrine, I really think you have been quite clever. It may be we have been misjudging you a teeny bit all these years. So appropriate, too! What a Trethowan has dispersed, a Trethowan recovers!’

  ‘Well, we’re not sure of the legal —’

  ‘We shall demand it back. Of course. Now, perhaps if you’ve seen enough of the garden, Janet, we could go into the summerhouse and Peregrine can tell us all
.’

  But I didn’t want that. I wasn’t going to be a police mole, feeding the gutter press through Aunt Sybilla. Besides, I had seen through the thick skirting of shrubs a scrap of blue material in the summerhouse, telling me that Chris was there (she loves that sort of middling blue that suggests nothing so much as one of the Women’s services). Presumably she had not left the place since we spoke, or else had come back. Perhaps it had memories of a sentimental or erotic nature for her. Luckily the rest of the party was headed off by Daniel, who was gazing at the modified jungle stretching for miles beyond the lake in the direction of Thornwick and demanding (in a rather grand-seigneurial voice, I thought): ‘But I want to see it all!’

  Sybilla rather reluctantly consented. ‘Perhaps we could go a little further. He is really rather a nice boy, yours, Peregrine.’

  Of course I agreed. But with the current standards of comparison available to Sybilla, it was a bit like winning a gold at the Moscow Olympics. Jan obviously had not yet exhausted her curiosity any more than Daniel had, so I let them go off quite happily through the undergrowth and made my way over to the summerhouse. I was not welcome. As soon as Chris saw me she set her face in an obstinate line.

  ‘Go away, Perry. You’re hounding me. You promised you wouldn’t. I will not talk to you.’

  ‘Very well, then, I’ll talk to you, Chris,’ I said, sitting down beside her. ‘First of all, let me say I’ve been an absolute fool about the father of your baby, but you must admit you led me on.’ She looked mulish and kept her mouth shut. ‘Now I know it’s Pete, and of course that makes it much worse. Chris, you must leave this place. Adding another Squealy to the pack is really carrying wildlife preservation a bit far. Think of the fuss Maria-Luisa is going to make, and I can’t say I’d blame her. I thought you might want to stick around in the hope that he’d marry you, but now of course there’s no question of that —’

  ‘Who says there’s no question?’ Cristobel burst out. ‘There’s such a thing as divorce.’

  ‘Has that come up? Has he said he wants to marry you?’