The Gropes

by Tom Sharpe

  He also discovered an old copy of the Daily Telegraph in the hotel hall and, having not seen a British newspaper since he began his journey, was delighted to find that there was no mention of a police search for anything to do with the crime he hadn’t in any case committed. But best of all, from Horace’s point of view, was reading the headline story of how a Mr Albert Ponson’s bungalow had collapsed in mysterious circumstances and that the owner was himself under arrest. What Horace didn’t know was that his edition of the Telegraph was an early one. Had he had access to a later edition or to an evening paper from that same day, he would have seen a very different headline indeed.

  Chapter 33

  Unknown to Horace, the previous day a series of al-Qaeda bombs had been found in twelve cities across England, though fortunately they were discovered and rendered useless before any damage could be done.

  Even so, the whole country was now on the alert for the terrorists much to the delight of the superintendent who had been under pressure to inform Scotland Yard in the clearest terms what the hell he was keeping under wraps in Essexford.

  ‘Just a normal sordid domestic quarrel with a missing wife and a kid of seventeen,’ he’d reported back. ‘And a jerry-built house that collapsed. The man we’ve arrested is a car thief suffering from paranoia. We’ve already had the wreckage searched for any explosives or documents that would indicate any knowledge of bomb-making and there aren’t any. And anyway, our bloke’s an alcoholic and as far from being a religious fanatic as anyone could be. Check his record if you don’t believe me.’

  Having kept the anti-terrorist squad away he went back to interrogating Albert Ponson and, more reluctantly, Vera Wiley. She was as difficult to get any sense out of as she had been before.

  ‘I’ve told you a thousand times, I left him in bed. Ask my brother Al, he’ll tell you.’

  ‘He says your husband told him he was going to cut this Esmond son of yours into bits and dissolve him in nitric acid in the fifty-gallon water butt at the back of the house. What do you say to that?’

  Vera was past saying anything. As she slumped back in a faint on the bench the superintendent knew he’d gone too far. He got up and left the room. He found the sergeant and told him to go in and deal with the bloody woman who was driving him out of his mind.

  ‘And don’t say anything to the bloody woman about her son being missing presumed dead when she comes round.’

  ‘Shall I show her the knife, sir?’ the sergeant asked, producing the thing in a plastic bag.

  The superintendent held his head between his hands.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, that’s not a carving knife. It is a chisel, a chisel covered in blood.’

  The sergeant looked at it and tried to think what to say.

  ‘I suppose that if one wants to chop a dead body into bits to fit into a water butt filled with nitric acid a chisel is as good as a carving knife. Even better in fact, I mean –’

  ‘Never mind what you mean. I’m telling you that’s not the carving knife I was shown and if that’s what you use at home to slice bread then by the time you’ve carved the stuff it must be as stale as a mummified brick.’

  The sergeant hurried off and presently returned with the carving knife. The superintendent stared at it furiously.

  ‘Where’s the bloody blood on it?’ he demanded.

  ‘The inspector said he thought it would be unhygienic to put blood on it. He wanted to use it at home and anyway he didn’t think you’d notice …’

  But the superintendent had had enough.

  ‘You go back in there and see if she’s come round yet.’

  He went through to Albert’s cell only to find that Albert Ponson still wasn’t prepared to answer any questions until he had a different solicitor.

  ‘I have no idea where Belinda’s gone or that damned youth for that matter. All I know is that they just disappeared. I’m not saying any more unless you get me a better lawyer. And don’t give me that bull about the roof falling on the two coppers’ feet. It didn’t do anything of the sort. That’s why I want my own lawyer and you can ask any questions you like but you’re not going to get any answers out of me without him.’

  The superintendent gave up. Ponson’s attitude almost convinced him that the damned man really didn’t have a clue where his wife and Esmond Wiley had got to. Worse still, he had warned the chief inspector that to drag the iron gate open would bring down the front of the bungalow and he hadn’t been lying. Thank God no one believed him. What was baffling was Ponson’s need to turn the place into a bulletproof fortress in the first place.

  As the superintendent drove home from the police station it suddenly dawned on him that the wretched man might be mad and suffering from an extreme form of persecution mania. That would account for the armoured bungalow. And if madness ran in the family it might also account for his sister’s conviction that her husband had tried to murder their son. On the other hand, there was that fearful slaughterhouse across the fields. Not that that didn’t suggest insanity too, though of a distinctly frightful kind.

  Or was he just pretending madness to hide the fact that he was both a crook and a terrorist? But then again the detectives had been over the house on their hands and knees and, apart from the bullet holes around the lock to the kitchen door, there wasn’t the slightest molecule of high explosive in the entire place.

  The superintendent sighed heavily and turned his car round to drive back to the station.

  ‘I want the entire body of detectives who have been assigned to this case to be assembled here in twenty minutes,’ he ordered the desk sergeant.

  While mulling over the absence of any evidence that Ponson had been involved in terrorism it had suddenly occurred to the superintendent that the wretched fellow might have been genuinely locked inside his extraordinary house as he claimed. When the detectives arrived he had one question to put to them.

  ‘Have any of you found any keys to the doors of this place?’

  No one had.

  ‘Next question: how come nothing electric worked?’

  ‘Someone wrecked the fuse box,’ a sergeant told him. ‘And I mean smashed it. That’s why he was shouting to be let out.’

  ‘And you’re only telling me now?’ fumed the superintendent. ‘Anything else I ought to know? Or would you rather keep it to yourselves?’ he asked sarcastically then went on. ‘What I’d like to know above all else is exactly where these three people have disappeared to. I want every one of you to concentrate on that from now on until I tell you not to.’

  ‘Three?’ said the chief inspector. ‘Don’t you mean two? Mrs Ponson and the Wiley boy?’

  ‘No, three. You’re forgetting Mr Horace Wiley. He’s the only person to have shown any real violence if that loony woman’s to be believed, and for once I’m beginning to look at it her way. Just suppose he did kill the son? Maybe he thought the murder had been witnessed by Mrs Ponson – she’d have to go too.’

  ‘So where are the bodies?’

  ‘Forget about them for the moment. Once we get Wiley we’ll get that out of him even if I have to use thumbscrews. What I want to know now is where that man Wiley is.’

  ‘Could be dead too.’

  ‘Could be anywhere,’ said the superintendent miserably.

  He’d come to the conclusion that the whole bloody family was probably insane, including the son, murdered or not. And the way things were progressing he would soon be joining them.

  That night, unable to sleep, the superintendent lay pondering the case he had taken on. At the time he had imagined it would be a relatively minor one and one that would allow him to arrest Albert Ponson whom he’d had in his sights for years but had been unable to pin a really serious crime on. But now he didn’t think so.

  On the other hand, the extraordinary armoured bungalow and possible three murdered people raised his hopes of pinning something on Ponson. He couldn’t be certain that they had been murdered but they’d all undoubtedly disappeared and as
his sleepless night wore on the more the superintendent came to believe and certainly hope that the DIY slaughterhouse had been used for something more than killing cattle and pigs. Forensics admitted there wasn’t sufficient human blood in the ghastly place to lead them to a definite conclusion but they did think that people could well have been strangled there. As the night wore on the inspector’s macabre hopes grew. Why, for instance, had the place never been scrubbed down but blood had been allowed to coagulate so that it was almost as hard as the concrete of the floor and wall? Surely that was Ponson sending a warning of what he was prepared to stoop to where his enemies were concerned?

  Against that there was the counter-evidence that no murder involving bloodshed had been committed there, and even the superintendent had to admit that claiming strangulation as the cause of death was rather clutching at straws.

  But what about the bullets at the bungalow? Could they really just be Ponson trying to get out of the locked house as he claimed?

  A moment later the superintendent had been forced back unhappily to the conclusion that he was dealing with nothing more than three missing persons. Worse still, he might be held responsible for the destruction of that bungalow. Although if he could just find Horace Wiley he might still have a good chance of promotion.

  It was nearly four o’clock before he finally fell asleep, just two hours before he needed to be up and facing the whole bloody nightmare all over again.

  Chapter 34

  On the coast in south Barcelona, Horace was having a delightful time. The hotel he’d found was excellent and he had booked a room overlooking the beach which was densely packed with sunbathers. To Horace’s amazement many of the women lying on the beach were wearing costumes that were skimpy to a point he wouldn’t have believed possible.

  Several hundred metres beyond the open area where people were swimming there was a row of buoys where yachts, speedboats and some larger dinghies were anchored.

  Horace sat on the balcony outside his room and stared down happily. He was perfectly content with the view from the hotel: he didn’t want to be on the crowded beach sunbathing, and in any case, he couldn’t swim. Behind him there were the faint sounds of the maid as she vacuumed his room and made the bed.

  Earlier, after a perfect breakfast in the dining room where he had a table near the window, the manager of the hotel who spoke good English had asked him if he wanted an English paper. Horace had said he’d like one but expressed his surprise that he could get one in Spain.

  ‘In Catalunya, señor,’ said the manager pleasantly, ‘they come every day in the summer. In winter you have to go into the town. It isn’t far but we’re shut for a month in January to give the waiters a holiday. The paper shop is down in the plaza now and you’ll get one there.’

  Horace thanked him and watched while he went to another table and spoke in Catalan and then in pure Spanish to a couple who evidently didn’t understand and replied in very good English that they were from Finland.

  ‘Finland,’ said the manager and asked if they had chosen what they would like for breakfast. But Horace had lost interest and went out onto the seafront. He found the newspaper shop where he bought the Daily Telegraph and, for a change, the Daily Mail.

  On his return he’d come up to his room and now he sat on the balcony without looking at the papers. A white cruise liner on the horizon caught his attention and he was just regretting he hadn’t chosen that comfortable way of escaping rather than the awful voyage to Latvia and the journey across Europe when he remembered he had taken the route he had via the London docks for fear that the regular ports could well have been watched and he might well have been recognised. In any case, he reflected, on a cruise liner there was also the chance of meeting one of his bank’s customers. No, the tramp steamer had been the safest, if most uncomfortable, way of crossing into Europe.

  All Horace needed now was to completely change his appearance. He had already grown a moustache and his beard was coming along nicely. It would more than match the one in the passport he had bought in Salzburg.

  Finally Horace turned to the newspapers he had bought and went through them thoroughly to check if there was any mention of a missing bank manager from Croydon and, worse still, his photograph. Much relieved at finding nothing of the sort, he resumed his studies of the bodies below him on the sand and wished he was still a young man.

  Chapter 35

  Esmond’s feelings were quite the reverse of his father’s in that he finally felt grown-up. He was enjoying himself hugely learning about running the estate with Old Samuel and was at last being treated like an adult and given adult responsibilities. He had grown very fond of the pigs and piglets rooting in the space between the vegetable garden next to the house and the high stone wall with the archway, with its great iron gate that they had driven the old Ford Cavalier through when they had buried it in the old drift mine. Then there was the milking shed with a stone-walled track that led down from the fields away across the grassy slopes. Esmond, or Joe Grope as everyone insisted on calling him, enjoyed driving the cows down to the shed just as he enjoyed everything he was told to do.

  He had no idea where he was but he didn’t care. For the first time in his life he was not being mollycoddled by his mother or so patently hated by his father. To complete his sense that he had escaped the divided self-uncertainty he had suffered all his previous life, Wiley by name had gone for ever although wily by nature remained. In bed that night Esmond considered the future and knew exactly what he was going to do.

  Chapter 36

  In Essexford, the superintendent was in despair. The new forensic specialist shipped in by the Home Office had been patronising and not in the least helpful, though he had identified Esmond’s DNA on the carpet of the bungalow where Albert claimed he had fallen and had further demonstrated Esmond’s relationship with Mrs Wiley by way of blood extracted in a syringe from his mother’s arm.

  ‘Sure, so we know they’re mother and son but there’s not enough of his blood on the floor to justify any suggestion that he’s been murdered. There’s glass all over the place. He could have tripped on a bottle. Were all these broken bottles here when you broke in?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the superintendent bitterly, not liking the inflection the forensic specialist put on the words ‘broke in’. ‘I hope you don’t think my men raided the off-licence and got plastered. They aren’t that dumb.’

  The forensic specialist shook his head and kept his thoughts to himself. He had an extremely low opinion of the uniformed branch at the best of times and the Essexford lot who had brought a bulldozer up simply to open a garage door and get into a house had to be the worst he’d ever come across.

  ‘Is there anything else you want me to look at?’ he asked, as he moved towards his car making a mental note to tell the Home Office not to waste his time in future.

  The superintendent seized his opportunity. He was still smarting over the forensic specialist’s arrogance.

  ‘There’s just one other building I’d like you to check out,’ he said, and led the way down the track to the DIY slaughterhouse. He’d had the sign KILL & EAT YOUR OWN removed from the main road but had kept the one nailed to the wooden side panel next to the DIY slaughterhouse. He knew that neither forensics team spoke to one another and intended to give the specialist a better understanding of that swine Ponson’s murderous tendencies and explain why it had been necessary to use the bulldozer to break into the house. He succeeded.

  ‘Dear God, the man must be an absolute sadist,’ the specialist muttered as he read the sign on the building.

  ‘Have a look at the floor inside and tell me something new,’ said the superintendent. ‘You’ll find all the blood samples you need.’

  He waited by the door. ‘This will give the arrogant bastard something to do,’ he thought to himself and accidentally on purpose kicked over a bucket of water onto hard dry blood on the concrete. By the time the man he had come to detest had walked the length of the build
ing the area near the door had a look of authentically fresh blood about it. The forensic specialist then added some of his own to it by slipping on the wet surface and hitting his head on the concrete. Before he could get to his feet he fell twice more and gave vent to his feelings in particularly foul language.

  ‘I’d better see if I can get you some Elastoplast,’ said the superintendent and hurried back to the remains of the bungalow.

  ‘And an ambulance: I may have concussion!’ shouted the forensic specialist before slowly slumping slightly more comfortably onto the grass under the board that read ‘DIY SLAUGHTERHOUSE’. He was beginning to understand how very appropriate the sign was.

  Chapter 37

  Meanwhile, Vera had been released from the police station and returned to the hospital where, in an isolated and soundproofed private room, she was being interviewed by a psychiatrist who found her exceedingly difficult to analyse.

  This was not surprising given the strain Vera had been under for so many days coupled with her increasing conviction that her darling boy had been murdered. In short, she had reverted to the appalling language of the trashy romances that had filled her mind for so many years. As a result when the psychiatrist asked her if she had a happy marriage she answered that her darling husband was the sweetest man she had ever met. The shrink consulted the transcript of her earlier interrogations and read that she had accused Horace of attempting to murder her darling son Esmond with a carving knife (‘darling’ was a word he had come to detest) and was at a loss to understand her change of attitude. To add to his confusion, Vera claimed that before they had been married she and her fiancé had danced until dawn before making love on the rocks beside the sea and under the moon.