Ancestral Vices (23 page)

As night fell outside his white-walled rooms Yapp committed to the computer his most intimate thoughts and feelings about the late Willy Coppett and Rosie, their actions and his own, such minutiae as what the ladies in the teashop had said to him when he was looking for lodgings and the remarks Mr Parmiter had made about tax-dodging and the advantages of buying the Bedford. The hours passed, midnight came and went, and still Yapp sat on in mental communion with his micro-processed alter ego and with each finger-tap on the keyboard and its instantaneous transmission of a digit of recalled experience to the electronic labyrinth, the dangers and chaos of reality receded, were broken down into the simplest units of positive or negative electrical impulse and reassembled in a numerative complexity that took as little cognizance of the true nature of the world as Yapp had programmed it to. Only on one question were they at variance. When, at five in the morning, an exhausted Yapp turned from feeding data to its interpretation and, out of weary impulse, asked ‘Who murdered Willy?’ Doris answered without hesitation, ‘Someone.’ Yapp gaped at the answer groggily.

‘I know that,’ he typed, ‘but who had a motive?’

‘Rosie’ read Doris. Yapp shook his head and typed furiously.

‘Who had the means?’

Again the name ‘Rosie’ appeared on the screen. Yapp’s fingers danced lividly on the keyboard.

‘Why would she do that?’ he demanded.

‘In love with you.’ The words seemed to waver in front of him.

‘You’re just jealous,’ he said, but the words remained unaltered on the screen. Yapp switched them off, stood up and walked unsteadily to the bed and slumped on it in his clothes.

In a room in the police station at Buscott Rosie Coppett sat on a chair and wept. She had done as Miss Petrefact had told her and had reported to the constable at the duty desk that Willy was missing, only to learn that he had been found. For a moment she had been happy, but only for a moment.

‘Dead,’ said the constable with the brutal stupidity of a young man who thought that because everyone knew Rosie Coppett was simple-minded she was without any feelings as well. Precisely the opposite was true. Rosie had an abundance of feelings and no way of expressing them except by crying, but it had taken some seconds for the smile that had gathered on her face to disintegrate and by that time the constable had fetched the Sergeant.

‘There, there,’ said the Sergeant putting a hand on her shoulder, ‘I’m sorry.’

It was the last kindly word anyone spoke to Rosie that day and she didn’t hear it. From that moment on she had
been asked to think. A detective inspector from Briskerton had arrived and had swept the Sergeant aside. Rosie had been taken into a room as bare of ornaments as her little rooms in Rabbitry Road were full of them, and she had been asked questions she had no way of answering except to cry and say she didn’t know. Did Willy have any enemies? Rosie said he didn’t. But someone has killed him, Mrs Coppett, so that can’t be true, can it? Rosie didn’t know Willy had been killed. Murdered, Mrs Coppett, murdered. The word hardly made any impression on Rosie. Willy was dead. She would never have to cook his tea for him again or have him be cross with her for letting Blondie get among the cabbages. They would never go for walks again on Sunday afternoons. She would never be able to buy him cards of bunnies from the newspaper shop on the corner. Never, never, never.

This certainty came and went and came again with more force each time and the questions she was being asked had nothing to do with that terrible realization. She answered them almost unconsciously. She could not remember when she had last seen him. Was it Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday, Mrs Coppett? But time was as irrelevant as the manner of Willy’s dying and her simple mind was grappling with the prospect of an endless time without Willy.

Across the table Inspector Garnet watched her closely and tried to decide if he was dealing with a stupid but innocent woman, a stupid and guilty one, or a woman
whose stupidity was ravelled with cunning and who, behind the façade of mindless grief, knew almost by instinct how to hide her guilt. A long career as a detective and a short course in criminology had influenced him to think that all criminals, and particularly domestic murderers, were stupid, emotionally unstable and at least partially clever. They had to be stupid to think that they could break the law and get away with it; they had to be emotionally unstable to commit acts of appalling violence; and they had to be in part clever because the rate of unsolved crime continued to rise in spite of brilliant detection by the police.

Having examined Willy’s terrible injuries the Inspector was in no doubt that he was dealing with a crime of passion. Buscott had nothing to interest gangsters or organized crime while the forensic expert’s preliminary report had ruled out the possibility that Willy had been interfered with sexually. No, all the evidence pointed to an ordinary, if nasty, domestic murder. And Mrs Coppett was a very strong woman while her late husband had been a very small man. Nor did the Inspector have to look far for motive. The dead man’s dwarfishness constituted one motive, his acknowledged bad temper another. Finally there was the fact that Mrs Coppett had only bothered to report that her husband was missing when he had already been found. That suggested some sort of cunning on her part, and her refusal to answer his questions straightforwardly confirmed it. He was particularly bothered by her inability
to say when the dead man had last left home, if he ever had before his death.

So while the Inspector continued his fruitless questioning into the night, other detectives visited Number 9 Rabbitry Road where they took note of Rosie’s predilection for all-in wrestlers and men with all the physical characteristics her late husband so evidently lacked, removed Yapp’s shirt from the clothes line and studied the stain, made more notes about Willy’s cot and Yapp’s unmade bed in the spare room, and were volubly assisted by the neighbours in arriving at totally false conclusions.

Armed with this new evidence they returned to the police station and conferred with the Inspector.

‘Some professor bloke’s been staying there?’ he asked. ‘What the hell for?’

‘That’s the puzzle. None of the neighbours knew but a couple of them stated definitely that they had seen Mrs Coppett and the fellow hugging and kissing on the landing on Tuesday night. And the old girl next door and her husband say the Coppetts were always rowing. They had a particularly nasty set-to last week just after the Professor arrived.’

‘Did they? Where’s this professor now? And what’s his name?’

‘Left this morning. Mrs Mane, she’s the old biddy next door, claims she saw him leave shortly after Mrs Coppett went shopping. Driving a Vauxhall, registration number CFE 9306 D. His name’s Yapp.’

‘Useful,’ said the Inspector and went back to Rosie
while the stained shirt was sent to the forensic experts for tests.

‘Now then I want to hear about this man who calls himself Professor Yapp,’ he told Rosie. ‘What sort of relationship have you been having with him?’

But Rosie’s thoughts were still fixed on the nothing that would be her life now that Willy had gone from it and she didn’t know what a relationship was. The Inspector spelt it out for her in words of one syllable. Rosie said he’d been kind to her, ever so kind. The Inspector could well believe it, but his sarcasm was wasted on her and she relapsed into a dull silence numbed by her sense of loss. Even when, in a desperate attempt to shock her out of her inability to answer his questions in accordance with accepted police procedure, the Inspector had her taken to identify Willy’s body, she was not to be broken from her grief.

‘That’s not my Willy,’ she said through her tears. ‘That’s not anybody.’

‘She’s in a state of shock, poor thing,’ said the Sergeant. ‘She may be as thick as two planks but she’s got feelings like the rest of us.’

‘She’ll be a poorer thing by the time I’m through with her,’ said the Inspector, but he wanted to sleep too so Rosie was given some blankets and put in a cell with a mug of cocoa.

Outside in the interrogation room a detective went through her bag and found the cheque and the letter from Yapp.

‘That just about wraps it up,’ Inspector Garnet told the Sergeant. ‘We’ll get his address from the bank in the morning and pull him in for questioning – or do you object to putting the pressure on him too?’

‘You can do what you like with the sod. All I’m telling you is that Rosie Coppett couldn’t murder anyone, let alone Willy. She’s too soft-hearted and simple. And anyway they were a devoted couple. Everyone knows that.’

‘Not the neighbours. They know something else again.’

‘What neighbours don’t?’ said the Sergeant and went back to his desk wishing to hell the CID from Briskerton hadn’t been called in. There were other things he wouldn’t have minded them investigating in Buscott, but Rosie Coppett as a murderess wasn’t one of them.

In his farm at the bottom of a muddy lane a mile from Rabbitry Road Mr Jipson slept almost as peacefully as Willy. It had been a week since he had put the body in the boot of the old Vauxhall and during that week Mr Jipson had coped with his conscience. He’d examined the front of his tractor for any sign of lost paint, and hadn’t found any; he had hosed it down and for good measure driven it into the duck-pond beside the farmhouse and then used it to clean out the calf byre so that it was well and truly covered in dung. Best of all, his wife was in hospital having her innards out (as he described a hysterectomy) and wasn’t around to watch him or ask
him awkward questions. She might have noticed some change in him. But Mr Jipson was his old self again. The killing of Willy was an accident and could have happened to anyone. It wasn’t his fault that the bloody dwarf had chosen his tractor to walk into and Mr Jipson couldn’t see why he should be penalized by an accident. He worked hard and made a decent living and there was no point in giving it up by telling the world. It had just . . . happened. And anyway the people in that old Vauxhall must have had something to hide or they wouldn’t have hidden Willy Coppett so thoroughly. This last had been the most convincing argument as far as Mr Jipson’s slight conscience was concerned. Nobody who wasn’t guilty of something else would have driven a car around in hot weather with a dead dwarf in the boot and not reported it – and what had they been doing on the night of the accident? They hadn’t been in the car and they couldn’t have been anywhere nearby or they’d have seen him put the body in and raised Cain. Mr Jipson had considered the land where the car had been parked and had thought about the coppice. That was part of Mr Osbert Petrefact’s estate and he’d been having trouble with poachers, hadn’t he? And poaching was a crime, which was more than could be said for road accidents, and therefore the poachers deserved what they had got more than he did.

Mr Jipson slept easily.

In spite of his ordeal the previous day and his disturbing session with Doris, Yapp woke early and, largely because of them, stayed awake. In the bright morning light of his scholastic cell he realized the stupidity of his action in disposing of Willy’s body. He ought to have gone straight to the police. That was easy to see now that he was back in the sane world of the University instead of on a lonely road surrounded by the irrational and predatory influences of nature. It was too late now to act sensibly or, if sense came into it at all, he had to continue as he had so precipitously begun.

At eight he left his rooms carrying the plastic dustbin sack containing his clothes. Having opened it and caught its dreadful aroma he had decided against taking the jacket and trousers to the dry-cleaners. He also decided he never wanted to wear the things again. At half-past eight he had driven to the town refuse dump and, having waited until there were no trucks about, went in and dropped the bag down the cascade of municipal muck where with any luck it would soon be buried.

Next he had to clean the boot of the old Vauxhall. Willy had leaked conspicuously all over the floor and the boot still stank. Yapp drove back into town, for the first
of many times regretting that he held such strong views on private ownership and didn’t have a car of his own. He also lacked a garage where he could scrub the boot out in privacy. There was nothing for it, he would simply have to use a self service car-wash. Stopping at a chemist he bought a bottle of Dettol, and then, to make doubly sure, a small can of Jeyes’ Fluid. Then he drove out to a garage, opened the boot and the two antiseptic containers, poured their contents all over the floor, and with an inexpertise that came from never having had to take a car through an automatic washing machine, drove into it with the boot still open to ensure that it got a proper sluicing. For the next few minutes drivers on their way into town were interested to watch the effect of a modern, efficient and self-motivated car-washing machine at work on an old Vauxhall whose boot-lid had been left deliberately wide open. Yapp, trapped inside the vehicle by the whirling brushes and the jets of water, could only surmise from the noise what was happening. The brushes had slammed the boot down before allowing it to open again while they attended to the back bumper, but on their return journey up and over the car found the boot in their way. A less conscientious machine might have stopped but this one didn’t. While the interior of the boot filled with a mixture of Jeyes’ Fluid and Dettol which seeped out in a grey pool behind the car, the flailing brushes scoured the underside of the lid with admirable efficiency and then, determined to get on with the roof, tore the thing from its rusted hinges,
carried it before them along the top and finally hurled it down the windscreen and across the bonnet onto the ground. Yapp sat staring through the shattered windscreen as the brushes moved back towards him. He could see now that he had made a bad mistake. He could also feel it. Water, liberally saturated with some sort of detergent, had soaked him, and the passage of the boot across the roof had deafened him. From his viewpoint there was only one thing left that this infernal contrivance could do now and that was scour his face with pieces of broken glass from the hole in the windscreen. Faced with this awful prospect Yapp ignored the instructions clearly printed beside the coin-slot, opened the door to get out and would have done so if one side of the device hadn’t promptly banged it to. Yapp took one more look at the approaching brushes and hurled himself face downwards on the seat. For two dreadful minutes he lay there, soaked, spattered with broken glass and parts of the wiper while the car-wash continued its work of destruction. By the time its cycle had ended the Vauxhall no longer smelt even vaguely of Willy. The Dettol and the Jeyes’ Fluid had seen to that. On the other hand it was conspicuous in other respects. It not only lacked a boot lid and a windscreen, it was without the door Yapp had so incautiously opened and the interior was as drenched as Yapp himself.