Perfect Gallows

by Peter Dickinson

  “I never listen.”

  “Much of it is true. I have more than once prevented actors who thought me their friend from getting parts they desperately wanted. Outside the profession I have exploited whoever I needed to and refused to be exploited in return. In my own way I have been as ruthless as Chaka. The difference is that I have been equally ruthless with myself. Nothing and nobody, myself included, matters, compared to the performance. That is the only thing that counts.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. I’ll go whenever you want.”

  “An analyst, depending on his creed, might trace my behaviour to my relationship with my mother, or my lack of stature, or whatever. My own rationale has been that I must have no impediments to my career, no ties of duty, friendship, affection, need. I must slide through the seas with a clean keel. But privately I have been aware that there is more to it than that.

  “There has been another kind of sacrifice—or rather, such events, in addition to the hackneyed sense in which I have been speaking of sacrifice, have sometimes also been sacrifices in the original meaning of that word, magical acts which endow the operator with powers not his own. To that extent I am like Chaka, whose authority was fed on the deaths of his victims. Of course I do not believe in powers out there, invisible forces, angelic or demonic, that can be summoned by word and ritual to do my bidding. Despite that what seems to happen can most truthfully be described in terms of magic. The spirit I conjure is mine, the deeps from which I call it forth are me. Perhaps all that is taking place, physically, is the transfer of a few molecules across a millimetre of my brain, but when that has happened the powers are there. The audience respond. They know.”

  “Magic does sometimes work.”

  “I can remember the place and hour at which I first half-knowingly performed the ritual. Dusk. A lane in Hampshire, under beech trees. We waited, leaning on our bicycles, to allow a convoy of American army lorries turn in to the driveway. I let the girl understand that our affair was over. Five weeks ago I received a letter from her daughter—our daughter, though we did not at the time realize that she was pregnant—saying that she had recently died of a brain haemorrhage. The girl had made no attempt to get in touch with me in the intervening years, though I learnt from other sources that she had refused an abortion and insisted on keeping the child. She had married and had more children, and as far as I am aware had led a reasonably contented life—she certainly had it in her to do so. Despite that my daughter’s letter was extremely bitter, rancorous, an unhealed suppuration. It did not touch me at all. I felt no guilt. Instead, I imagined myself free-wheeling down the drive behind the last lorry, beginning to sense that something new and important had happened, a reinforcement of my powers, somehow connected with breaking off the affair. Deliberately, to emphasize my own confidence in that still being the case, I chose to take you to a sale at the house where all this happened. I wanted to prove to myself my own right to have behaved as I had.”

  “Won’t she tell Hickey or someone? The daughter, I mean?”

  “I think it quite likely. My public credit may suffer a little, but my private accounts will be in the black. The episode was necessary—in a certain sense crucial. Do you understand?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Such sacrifices have occurred a number of times since then, not always or only concerned with the women I have lived with. To be merely bored with a companion is not enough. There must be a genuine sense of giving something up, of moving on, of loss. I should certainly feel that at your departure.”

  “Me too.”

  “Well, that’s what I decided must now happen. I went on tonight with my mind made up. The house was full, the performance went well, everybody was very kind, Benny enthusiastic as only he knows how, it is clear that I can make my own terms for Broadway—but I knew from the first scene that it would not do. I felt no relief, no cleansing of my keel, only loss. All I had done to make the performance work was to draw on my reserves. This has never happened before.”

  He paused but she said nothing, waiting, sucking repetitively at her lower lip.

  “What happened last night was a magical act. Not on my part, but on yours.”

  “It wasn’t anything. I was just stupid. Don’t let’s talk about it. I feel so ashamed.”

  “You have altered the rules. The old rites have lost their force, and I must attempt new ones. We will therefore proceed to summon the dead.”

  “You’re acting.”

  “It is my only means of telling the truth, the embodiment of an inward apprehension in visible form. My name is Adrian Waring. That is who I am. I took the name by deed poll when I came out of the army in 1947. Before that there was a boy and a young man called Andrew Wragge. He died, as he had always foreseen he would, during the war, not instantly from a bullet or shell, but over a period. I remember the time and place at which that death began, standing behind a yew hedge, turning away from an old man who was pleading to be heard. Now I am going to bring him back to life. That is to say I am going to attempt to explain how and why he chose to make that particular betrayal, inevitable in its way, but still the one sacrifice I seem never to have convinced myself was acceptable. It will take some time.”

  “As I ran down the dovecote stair my thoughts were wholly of myself. I could get rid of Jean for the moment by telling her what I had found—unless she wanted it to be known that we had arranged the meeting she would have to leave the scene at once. I could be as brusque as I chose. There would be no more performances, so there was no longer any need for a happy Miranda. Are you still awake?”

  “Course I am, but I do think you ought to stop. You don’t want to croak tonight.”

  “The voice will stand it. Much more important to me than Jean was that I must reduce my own role as a witness as far as I could, so as not to delay my call-up or in any other way disrupt the arrangement Barrie Oakley had said he would make. All I would admit to was going out for an early stroll, noticing the forced door and finding the body. Jean in fact insisted on seeing for herself—she suspected me of trying some kind of trick—but having done so she left. I ran up to the house, woke my Cousin Elspeth and told her what I had found. But even before I spoke to her I had begun to be aware that if I had listened to what Samuel had been trying to tell me the night before he would still be alive. I worked out most of the details over the next few days, but I still said nothing, and when it came to the inquest, as I told you, I maintained my silence. Charles gave evidence that he had dismissed Samuel for gross impertinence while they were dressing for the play; Mrs Mkele said that he had been very depressed since his old master’s death and was not asked to say why. Perhaps she too chose not to rock the boat. At any rate, the motive for suicide must have appeared more than adequate.”

  “Poor old man. But it’s a long time ago. You couldn’t’ve done anything, could you?”

  “I could have listened. I had promised to do so.”

  “I meant after. He was dead. Telling people wouldn’t …”

  “That is the rational response. You might also say that I could not have known that my refusal to hear what Samuel was trying to tell me would lead to his death. Rationally, that is true. But we are not dealing in rationalities. It is not my refusal which, in your phrase, has begun to haunt me. It is the manner of my refusal. I killed him with the same voice as that with which I killed my uncle, my great-grandfather. I should have spoken to him in my own voice. He would have understood.”

  He fell silent. The fire was almost out and had ceased its murmur. The faint ripple of the water-clock was the only sound until, somewhere outside, a blackbird piped up, anticipating day.

  “Are you still awake?” he said again.

  “I’m thinking. It wasn’t the Americans. Who killed him, I mean. If it was them, you wouldn’t’ve felt …”

  “Yes. It may be morally absurd, but that is so. My actions and motives wo
uld have been no different, but my refusal to listen to Samuel would no longer have been a link in the chain of events that led to his death.”

  He paused again. This time, for once, it was she who took the initiative.

  “You’d better tell me or you won’t get to sleep.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. I feel extremely reluctant. Well, you remember that I told Trinder about the Wragge fortune and the missing heir? He already had dealings with Stephens, and must have told him. Stephens took advantage of the tours of the house to photograph the family portrait, which showed Charles as a young man. With that to go on—Trinder had theatrical connections—they were able to find an actor of the right build to impersonate Charles, and by the device of having him lose his memory they avoided the pitfalls such as the Tichborne claimant, for instance, encountered. Thanks to May’s enthusiastic reception he was provisionally accepted by the family. This may seem surprising, but he did in fact put on a very good show. Since Sir Arnold refused to give an opinion the one active objector was Samuel, so in an effort to prevent him making his own inquiries Stephens pretended to take my side and send a private detective to check on the story. I don’t imagine the man ever left the camp.

  “Then Sir Arnold’s condition took a turn for the worse. He accepted at last that he was dying and sent for his lawyer so as to change his will and leave his estate to me. Samuel made the arrangements but did not know what the changes were to be. Hoping to influence the decision he must have asked Stephens whether there was any last-minute news from the detective, telling him that it was urgent, perhaps even why. At any rate Stephens and Trinder attempted to bolster Charles’s story by providing a forged newspaper cutting which appeared to verify an important detail. Newspapers are printed on both sides, of course, so they used an old photograph of a flower show on the back. Trinder’s tame printer may have had it lying around his works, or he may have worked part-time for a local paper. It was the best they could do. They had very little time, so little that Trinder took the risk of getting me to bring the cutting out that week-end.

  “I don’t know whether May saw the cutting, but if she did I think she would have spotted that January is an improbable season for a flower show. She was extremely sharp. At any rate, I am fairly certain that she knew from an early stage that Charles was an impostor, and may even have worked out or wheedled out of him that he was in collusion with Stephens. She was determined that she was going to stay at The Mimms and oust Elspeth after her father’s death, and had recognized Charles as a suitable tool to achieve this. Once the will was read it seemed to be in everyone’s interest that Charles would inherit.”

  “Except yours.”

  “I had no legal title. Mind you, I doubt if the stuff about the demolition of the house in the absence of a male heir would have stood up if it had been contested in the courts, but that would have involved huge costs, long delays and great uncertainty. In any case, Charles bought me off with a promise of support once the will was proved in his favour. At the same time he got me to use what influence I had with Samuel to persuade him to give up his opposition. I did so. We agreed that if no new evidence had come to light by the time I was called up, then Samuel would accept Charles as Sir Arnold’s heir. I, casually since I didn’t believe it would happen but still quite definitely, promised that if he found such proof I would support him. He told me he still had a chance. I thought he was speaking just of a general faint possibility, but I now think he meant there was one particular thing he wanted to try. He waited for his moment while they were dressing for our first performance of The Tempest.

  “You remember May had got out an album of early photographs to remind Charles of things he was supposed to know, and this then disappeared? Charles changed the subject abruptly when May started talking about its loss, but by that time she had already asked one of the maids about it. So Samuel would have known. There was one particular photograph which showed Charles, as a child, naked. When the supposed Charles came out of the dressing-room he had not finished pulling up his hose, and he was in a state of outrage and fear. It is clear to me that Samuel had worked out why the album was missing, had concealed Charles’s hose so as to delay him and thus be left alone with him, and had then pretended to find the missing garment. While Charles was putting it on he had seized his underpants and exposed his genitals.”

  “No! A birthmark? But …”

  “The essential element in the ritual by which a Zulu boy was accepted as an adult warrior was circumcision. I did not know this at the time, of course; in fact I looked it up only last week. I simply assumed that Samuel had seen something which both he and Charles knew proved that he was not the child in the photograph.”

  “I don’t see. Couldn’t it have been done after?”

  “Yes, but not the reverse. The child in the photograph had been circumcised. I don’t remember this as fact, but it is clear to me that it must have been so. It was a common practice among the English classes to which the Wragges presumed to belong by the time Charles was born. No doubt their doctor advised it. Some thought it hygienic, especially for children in the colonies, but the original motive, believe it or not, had been to discourage masturbation.”

  “Did it?”

  “To judge by Philip Roth, no. So what Samuel must have seen was that Charles had not been circumcised. With the album gone that was still not proof. May had told me that they were not normally let run around naked, and in any case she and Elspeth would have contradicted each other’s evidence. So Samuel’s first thought was that we must send for the real Charles’s wife.

  “In fact the verification of Samuel’s proof is irrelevant. The important point is that Charles knew. We performed the play without an interval and I was on stage throughout, but Charles was off for long periods. May of course fussed to and fro. He would have plenty of chance to take her aside. Stephens was in the audience—she could have talked to him. After the play Charles stuck to me like a leech—I thought it was because he was interested in Oakley and Price. At one point I found May making a fuss about her butter, which she said had been stolen. Stephens must have told her that she must somehow arrange for Samuel to go out and meet him that evening, which she did by hiding the butter out on the windowsill of the pantry—I trod in it as I climbed down. They may well have calculated that Samuel would seize the chance in any case—since he had been prevented from talking to me, Stephens was his other best hope of help. Anyway he went, and Stephens met him, heard what he had to say, asked if he had told anyone else and, learning that he had not, laid him out. Stephens was immensely strong. I remember him lifting Jean into the back of a truck as if she had weighed nothing.

  “I think it possible that he had worked out his scheme in advance, not for this particular moment, but provisionally; he had been bothered by Samuel’s persistence for some time. The stake, remember, was enormous. I do not mean that when he first mentioned lynching to me, or when he came on the tours of the house, that he was already thinking of murdering Samuel, only that the potential was there and continued to grow. What he needed was something from which to hang his victim, ground soft enough to take the imprint of boots—he had a supply of them in his stores—and a means of reaching both the gallows and the ground below it without leaving the impression of his own unusually large feet. The dovecote provided all this. He could hang the body from the beam and then rotate the ladder, standing on the lowest rung and pressing the individual boots into the droppings on the floor. No doubt the result would not have stood up to close forensic inspection, though he had very bad luck in my finding the body so soon—a day or two more and the rungs would have been covered with bird-droppings again.”

  “But after all that they said it was suicide.”

  “My own guess is that it wasn’t an out-and-out cover-up, rather a case of tactful under-investigation once the verdict of suicide became plausible.”

  “What happened after? Do you know? The sergeant a
nd Mr Trinder and everyone, I mean.”

  “By the time I came out of the army Elspeth was living at Charles Street. I used to stay with her when I was in London, and she was very useful to me in other ways, getting me introductions, giving me money and so on. In the end she became somewhat over-possessive, or so I told myself, and I stopped seeing her. Until then she kept me in touch with events at The Mimms. Charles and May succeeded in appointing fresh lawyers and having the will proved. I imagine that at that point Stephens and Trinder expected to be able to cash in on their investment—I can’t be sure about that since Elspeth of course didn’t know of their involvement, but I know what May’s defence was. It was characteristic. She let Charles go back on the bottle. The cellars at The Mimms were still extremely well stocked, and she saw to it that she controlled access to them. Charles became totally dependent on her. According to Elspeth she treated him like a trained dog, rewarding or punishing him according to performance. When Stephens and Trinder made their attempt to cash in she called their bluff. If they exposed Charles they would get nothing. She must have known that Stephens had killed Samuel, and wouldn’t have hesitated to accuse him of doing so, and accuse Trinder of fraud—Charles would have told her of his existence, and everything else. The point was that she had less to lose than they had. All three men could at least have gone to prison for conspiracy to defraud, and Stephens might have faced the death penalty. Knowing her I have no doubt that she saw the blackmail attempt off. Next she had the entail of her father’s will broken by Act of Parliament, and then got Charles to make his own will entirely in her favour and organized his affairs to reduce death duties, but interestingly she seems to have done her best to keep him alive well beyond the seven year period. She enjoyed her power over him, I think. It was a sort of revenge on her own father. She lived to be ninety-one. The sale we went to was consequent upon her death. Incidentally, she had never let Charles pay me the allowance he had promised me. Elspeth, on the other hand, when she died in the late Sixties, left me almost everything she possessed. About the others I know nothing, except that Mrs Mkele suffered a stroke while I was still in the army and became completely paralysed and helpless. I don’t know when she died. That’s all.”