Ancestral Vices (24 page)

Sitting up carefully to avoid any further injury from the glass, Yapp stared at the havoc with dismay. If anything was needed to prove his monotonously repeated
opinion that machines should never be allowed to deprive honest craftsmen of their jobs, the automatic car-wash had done it. No clumsy-handed human car-cleaner could have achieved so much damage in so short a time even if he’d taken a sledgehammer to the car. Anyway he hadn’t the time for such considerations now. He had to get the damned machine back to the University and then when it was dry arrange for it to be repaired.

Yapp got out, collected the lid and slid it into the boot and was busy trying to disentangle the door from the mechanism of the car-wash where it was firmly lodged when he was interrupted by a shout. It didn’t sound like a shout to him because his eardrums seemed still to be reverberating from the clash of metal against metal, but the expression on the face of the man who uttered it suggested it was.

‘You fucking idiot, can’t you read instructions?’ yelled the man. ‘Look what you’ve done to my car-wash.’

Yapp looked, and had to admit that the machine hadn’t come out of the confrontation unscathed. The hole in the windscreen had taken its toll of the nylon brushes while the bars which held them were definitely hot.

‘I’m very sorry,’ he muttered.

The man stared at him dementedly. ‘You’ll be a fucking sight more sorry by the time I’ve finished with you,’ he bawled, ‘I’ve half a mind . . . no, bugger that, I’ve a whole fucking mind to have the police on you and the insurance assessor and . . .’

But the word ‘police’ had had a galvanic effect on Yapp. The one group of men he’d come to the bloody garage to avoid would ask questions he had no way of answering without getting into deeper water. ‘I’ll pay for the damage,’ he said desperately. ‘There’s no need to call the police. This whole unfortunate affair can be settled discreetly.’

‘Like fuck it can,’ shouted the man, eyeing Yapp and then the old car with utter loathing and deciding that a maniac who drove such a decrepit car and went round wrecking brand-new car-washes was the last person to settle things with anything approaching discretion, ‘you’ll fucking well stay here till the cops arrive.’

And to make sure that Yapp didn’t make his escape, however improbably, in the wrecked car, he seized the keys from the ignition and bolted into the garage office. Yapp followed lugubriously, unconscious that he was leaving a trail of detergent and broken glass.

‘Look,’ he said reaching in his pocket and taking out a sopping cheque book, ‘I assure you that . . .’

‘And so do I,’ snapped the man and grabbed the cheque book as added surety, ‘I’m calling the cops and that’s final.’ He dialled and presently was talking to someone in the police station. Yapp listened half-heartedly. Perhaps the police would not be interested; even if they were it seemed likely that the car-wash which had so effectively removed the top of the boot and the door must have done even more thoroughly by the less obvious and tenacious remains of Willy Coppett. This hopeful
train of thought was interrupted by a query from the proprietor.

‘What’s the number of your car?’ he demanded.

Yapp hesitated. ‘Actually it’s not my own car. It’s a hire car. I don’t know its number.’

‘Says it’s a hire car,’ said the man into the telephone. ‘Yes, an old Vauxhall . . . hang on, I’ll go and have a look.’

He put the phone down and scurried out of the office. When he returned his eyes had an even more dangerous glint in them.

‘That’s right,’ he told the police station, ‘CFE 9306 D. What is he wanted for? . . . What’s his name?’ He eyed Yapp cautiously.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Professor Walden Yapp, I’m at the . . .’

‘Says his name’s Yapp,’ the man told the police. ‘That’s right . . .’ He dried up suddenly and edged round the counter, keeping a now wary eye on the wanted man. He put the phone down and picked up a tyre lever.

‘Nice day,’ he remarked with nervous affability but Yapp was in no state of mind to notice. As far as he was concerned it was a positively diabolical day and his lack of eight hours’ sleep was catching up with him. In any case he was beginning to wonder what the effects of sharing the facilities offered by the car-wash with the old Vauxhall were likely to be on a constitution already weakened by several days in bed with flu and the discovery that he was in the noxious company of a
putrefying dwarf. Thoughts of pneumonia and enteric fever concerned him.

‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I can’t wait around in these sopping clothes. I’ll go back to my rooms and change and come back and discuss this matter with you later on.’

‘You bloody well . . .’ the garage proprietor began before remembering that the police had explicitly warned him that he was dealing with a desperate and almost certainly violent man and that on no account was he to tackle him. ‘If you say so, but the police will be here in a minute . . .’

‘Tell them I’ll be back in a hour’s time,’ said Yapp, and promptly walked out of the office and strode off along the road towards the University. Behind him the garage proprietor was on the phone to the police station again.

‘The bugger’s escaped. Made a dash for it. I tried to stop him but it was no use. Hit me over the head with a blunt instrument.’ To lend credence to this story and to ensure that he got his photograph and some free publicity in the
Kloone Evening Guardian
, he then tore his shirt, smashed a chair and tapped his head rather harder than he had intended with the tyre lever. He was moaning quite genuinely when the first police car shot into the forecourt.

‘Did me over proper and got away,’ he murmured to the policemen who found him. ‘Can’t have got far. Tall fellow with wet clothes. Sopping wet.’

More police cars arrived, radios crackled and in the
distance sirens wailed. The hunt for Walden Yapp was on. Five minutes later it was over and Yapp, who had been apprehended at a bus stop where he was arguing with a conductor that public-transport officials had no right to refuse to carry paying public persons and even less right to describe him as undried laundry, was seized, had his arms twisted behind his back, was handcuffed, told to come along quietly and shoved into the back seat of a police car which then drove off at unnecessarily high speed.

The nightmare had begun.

It continued with remorseless efficiency and in blatant ignorance of the truth. By midday the Vauxhall had been further dismantled by forensic experts whose attention had been drawn to the boot by the remarkable amount of antiseptic on the floor. This, they now announced, had not prevented them from proving conclusively that the boot had recently contained a corpse. Yapp’s rooms at the University provided more evidence. A pair of muddy shoes and some socks were taken away for soil analysis and having found his inseminated Y-fronts in his case the experts impounded all other articles of clothing in the rooms and took them off for microscopic examination.

All this time Yapp sat in the Kloone police station demanding his rights, and in particular his right to telephone his solicitor.

‘All in good time,’ the detective-inspector told him
and made a note that Yapp hadn’t asked why he had been arrested. As a result, when he was allowed to phone, the call was taped while the Inspector, two sergeants and a constable listened to the conversation in another room to corroborate the evidence of the tape which might not be admissible in court. It was typical of Yapp that his solicitor was a Mr Rubicond, whom he had several times consulted in matters concerning police harassment of student protest marches. Since on each occasion the students had resolutely refused to march and the police had no one to harass, Mr Rubicond had developed a distinctly sceptical attitude to Yapp’s calls for his services.

‘You’ve been what?’ he asked.

‘Arrested,’ said Yapp.

‘What’s the charge, if any?’

‘Murder,’ said Yapp, keeping his voice low and lending it a sinister tone in the next room.

‘Murder? Did you say “murder”?’ Mr Rubicond sounded understandably incredulous. ‘Whom are you supposed to have murdered?’

‘A Person of Restricted Growth called Mr William Coppett late of Number 9 Rabbitry Road, Buscott . . .’

‘A person of what growth?’ demanded Mr Rubicond.

‘Restricted growth. In uncivil rights language, a dwarf.’

‘A dwarf?’

‘That’s what I said,’ squawked Yapp beginning to find his legal adviser’s obtuseness extremely trying.

‘I thought that’s what you said. I just wanted to make sure. I take it that you didn’t.’

‘I did,’ said Yapp.

‘In that case I can’t begin to act for you,’ said Mr Rubicond, ‘unless, of course, you’re prepared to plead guilty. We can always put in a plea of diminished—’

‘I’m not talking of murdering him. I said I did say he was a dwarf.’

‘All right. Now say nothing else until I arrive. I take it you’re in the Central Police Station?’

‘Yes,’ said Yapp, and put the receiver down. By the time Mr Rubicond arrived he was no longer there but was back in the police car being driven down to Buscott. The transcript of his conversation together with the findings of the forensic experts had already reached Inspector Garnet, whose opinion about Rosie’s cunning had been jolted by the discovery that the blood stained into the shirt undoubtedly matched that of her murdered husband.

‘Five’s more likely,’ he told the Sergeant who still maintained that she was as thick as two planks. ‘Any murderess who leaves that sort of evidence hanging on the clothes line’s got to be unless, of course, she’s out to pin the crime on this bastard Yapp. In which case she may be a bit more cooperative this morning.’

With his preconceptions finely adjusted the Inspector went back to question her – or, to be more precise, to programme her.

‘Now then,’ he said, ‘we’ve got your precious Professor Yapp and we know for certain he had the body of your husband in the boot of his car. In fact Willy wasn’t dead when he put him in. He bled in that boot and dead bodies don’t bleed so much. Now can you tell me why you washed his shirt for him?’

‘There was blood on it,’ said Rosie.

‘Willy’s, Mrs Coppett, Willy’s blood. We’ve proved that.’

Rosie stared at him. Her thoughts couldn’t cope but her feelings could and she had passed from the stage of sorrow to that of anger. ‘I didn’t know that. I wouldn’t have washed it otherwise.’

‘What would you have done, Mrs Coppett?’

‘Killed him,’ said Rosie, ‘with the carving knife.’

Inwardly the Inspector smiled but there was no change of expression on his face. This was what he wanted to hear. ‘But you didn’t, did you? You didn’t know because he didn’t tell you. What happened that night when he came home with blood on his shirt?’

Rosie struggled to remember. It was very difficult. She tried to visualize the scene again but the kitchen had been her home for so long, the centre of her life where she cooked and read her magazines and fed Willy his supper every day and Hector had his basket in the corner and she pinned up her pictures of wrestlers because her mum had said her father had been a wrestler, though she hadn’t remembered his name, and maybe one of them
had been her dad. And now it had been spoilt for her by a man who’d pretended to be fond of her and she’d looked after when he was sick and all the time he had murdered Willy and he’d had cut hands. She remembered that detail in the confusion.

‘He’d cut his hands, had he? On the same night he had blood on his shirt.’

Rosie responded to his interest. It was a help to have someone to sort things out for her. ‘Yes, and his coat was all damp. I said he’d get a cold and he did. He was in bed for four days. I took his dinner up to him.’

Inspector Garnet repressed the impulse to ask what else she took Yapp in bed. Just so long as she kept talking he would find the truth. And when she had spilled her beans he’d hit her again with the evidence of the neighbours who’d seen her in Yapp’s arms and Mr Clebb’s conviction that he’d witnessed her massaging the filthy swine’s penis when he had taken his dog for a walk. And Rosie talked and with each word she uttered and each nudge from the Inspector in the direction he wanted her to go, Rosie’s imagination, already primed by so many stories in
Confessions
magazines, gave a new gloss to the facts. The Inspector was particularly interested in her account of Yapp’s arrival and his insistence that he wanted extras. By the time he had gently wheedled from her what extras were and had gone on to fix it firmly in her mind that Yapp had actually stated that he wanted to make love to her he was satisfied he had the clearest
motive for the murder and was of the opinion that she’d make an excellent prosecution witness with a pathos that would influence any jury.

‘Now if you’ll just sign this,’ he said, handing her the text of her statement, ‘you should be able to go home quite soon.’

Rosie signed it and went back to her cell. She knew now why Willy had been murdered. The Professor was in love with her. She wondered why she hadn’t thought of that before. Anyway, she could think about it now and it helped to take her mind off poor Willy.

‘Right,’ said Inspector Garnet briskly as he took his seat opposite Yapp, ‘now there are two ways of going about this. The short and comfortable or the long and nasty. Make up your mind which it’s to be.’

Yapp looked at him with loathing. His opinion of the police as the praetorian guards of property, privilege and the established rich hadn’t been in the least mollified by his treatment since his arrest. He had been driven away from Kloone without being allowed to consult his solicitor, had spent a most uncomfortable three hours sitting in wet clothes in the back of the police car, and was now confronted by an inspector with a small moustache. Yapp particularly disliked the look of that moustache. It suggested that the Inspector was not a caring or concerned human being.

‘Well, which is it to be?’ snapped the Inspector. Yapp tried to adjust his thoughts to his predicament. In between bouts of shivering on the drive down he had decided that his only hope lay in being demonstrably cooperative and in telling the truth. If the police were at all perceptive they would realize that he had absolutely no motive for murdering Willy, that he had influential friends, if not at court, at least in Parliament and the
Labour Party, and that it was manifestly absurd to suppose he had homicidal tendencies. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth would demonstrate his innocence.