Death by Sheer Torture (8 page)

‘Oh, I don’t think that’s at all possible,’ Cristobel had said. ‘He was
deeply
wounded.’

‘What, at my calling him a sadist?’

‘No. At your calling him a mediocrity.’

Well, that figured. Or had seemed to at the time. Still, I recalled that conversation now, and wondered if Cristobel had ever wanted a reconciliation between me and the family. At times like this, you know, nasty thoughts even about the comparatively near and dear do occur to one.

I put on pyjamas and went over to the desk, where my notebook lay, white and inviting. I opened the window: the night air outside was warm, even heavy. It was early autumn—season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Or of decay and death, if you are in that frame of mind. I sat at the great Victorian desk, big enough to store a couple of bodies in, drew my notebooks towards me and took up my pen.

‘Why
that
way?’ was the first thing I wrote.

I’d told Joe that that was
just
the way one of my family
would
kill somebody, and I held by that. Still, almost any other way would have been quicker, cleaner, safer. Whoever did it must surely have been
seen
by my father to do it. And there was no guarantee that my father would not be heard, crying for help. I jotted down: ‘Lights on’. It was a spectacular but exceedingly dangerous way of getting rid of anybody, and it almost suggested that the method was part of the point—that the murder was some kind of appropriate revenge, some ghastly tit-for-tat affair.

Which in its turn suggested some victim of my father’s peculiarly perverted mind.

I next wrote: ‘Scissors? Knife? Where are they?’

Whatever it was had been used, it was in effect the murder implement, and would have to be found, even if it brought us no closer to any particular individual. And
that, to a practical policeman, immediately suggested an army of PCs swarming through the house. If a proper search of the house were to be made, let alone of the grounds, it would take days. Which would
not
please Aunt Sybilla. But perhaps I could suggest they search for the missing picture at the same time?

I wrote. ‘Picture. Get description. Painter.’

Then I wrote: ‘Financial situation. Not just Father’s. Lawrence’s. All the rest too.’

That, surely, Tim Hamnet would do. I hoped Chrissy would be left fairly well off—a tidy sum would be only her just deserts. My father, though, when I knew him, was not careful with money, even though he had always hated to be swindled. He was the last person in the world to care whether anybody else would be well off or hard up after he died. Lawrence
should
be very comfortably off. With the house, in the male line, went a hell of a lot of money. But these days, none of the whacking fortunes were quite what they were. There had been inflation, the house itself must be a terrible millstone, there was Peter, who seemed to have no visible means of support. Day-to-day living in the house seemed much more frugal than in my time. Was Lawrence becoming miserly in his old age, as so frequently happened, or were there solid reasons for the frugality? At least the house—that is, Lawrence—had tremendous assets, of every kind.

I wrote down: ‘Pictures. Worth how much?’

The Times
kept me informed of saleroom prices. Little-known Victorian painters were often fetching quite fantastic sums these days. Not to mention the moderns—and under Aunt Eliza’s supervision quite a lot of first-rate stuff had been bought for Harpenden in the ’twenties and ’thirties. Interesting.

On the other hand, it was not immediately apparent how the financial state of the head of the family could have any bearing on the death of my father.

I got up and walked around a bit. There was this to be said about Harpenden: it gave you room to move about. Hour by hour, in fact, I felt myself expanding. Space itself took on a new dimension, and I felt in a relation to things quite different from the one I was in in the little flat in Maida Vale, where the three of us lived. Thinking about us I thought about Daniel, and thinking about Daniel I (most unfairly) thought about the Squealies. There was the possibility that one of them
(not
all together, surely—I could not imagine all five of them moving through the house with murderous stealth) had crept over to the Gothic wing and snipped through the cord. This would argue, I thought, a certain mechanical aptitude, or that the Squealy in question had watched my father ‘at it’ before. Not impossible. The eldest Squealy was—what?—about ten. Still, I didn’t find it altogether probable. There was also the possibility that the murderer (or the Trethowans in general, closing ranks under attack, as was their wont) would put it about that that was what had happened. Even persuade one of the Squealies to confess. Though that might prove a highly dangerous course.

But so would be the other possibility: persuading a Squealy to do it and instructing it how. Hideously dangerous. But perhaps not quite so dangerous if the persuader were one of its parents.

It was just at this point in my perambulations about the great guest bedroom that I thought I heard something. I crossed to the window and stuck out my head: undoubtedly I had heard something, and what it was was sounds of fury, of altercation. And it wasn’t difficult to guess where they came from. I stuck my feet into slippers and quick as a flash I was out of the room, down the great staircase, and out of one of the back doors. I pulled the door to: McWatters had given me all the necessary keys, so I could get back in. I made off through the garden,
finding to my pleasure that I knew every tree, every flower-bed. The air was warm and still, the garden a mass of looming, menacing shapes, the moon through the trees highlighting the nearly bare branches. The leaves on the ground were like a pillow under my slippered feet. I skulked towards the Elizabethan wing.

The two wings on the back of the house were the Florentine wing (occupied by Sybilla and Mordred) and the Elizabethan (occupied by Peter and his brood). It required no great deductive genius to guess that if anyone was bawling their lungs out at twelve o’clock at night, it was likely to come from the Elizabethan wing. I darted from tree to tree, hugging the shade, shunning the moonlight. In no more than a couple of minutes I had landed up safe under an oak, hardly twenty feet from the lighted living-room window.

And boy! they were really going at it. There was Pete, standing in a filthy old sweater and baggy trousers, his foot resting on a chair, his whisky glass in his hand. And there was Maria-Luisa, hands on her hips, if there were still hips under that great bulging front, tossing her head, bending forward to give point to her hisses of hatred and contempt—looking, in fact, for all the world like Anna Magnani in one of those post-war neo-realistic films. And they were really handing it out, both of them. She, louder and shriller, but he really with considerable expertise and relish. I had to hand it to him: he was holding his own, all right.

As far as I could make out, of course. Because ninety per cent of all this was going on in Italian, which is really the only language to quarrel in. They made such good use of it that I don’t think I missed all that much, artistically, by not understanding: this wasn’t an exercise in logic. Still, as a policeman I would dearly like to have known what it was all about. Now and then Pete would let fly with a phrase or two in English: ‘You stupid bitch, you’ve
got it wrong as usual’ was one; ‘Why don’t you fucking learn English, then you might understand what’s going on?’ was another. These were phrases principally for his own satisfaction: it was like shouting insults at a Lambretta. On and on she went, higher and higher, working herself up to a final orgasm of fury.

I noticed, while this process was at a point of screw-turning tension, that her eye was suddenly caught by her own whisky glass standing on the table, and if Pete hadn’t been shouting so hard he might have noticed too. Advancing a step, she seized it in her capable kitchen hands and launched it with its contents straight at his head.

‘Bruto! Barbaro! Seduttore! Assassino!’

It didn’t need even as much as holiday Italian to understand that last one, and to wonder whether it was part of Maria-Luisa’s normal repertoire of abuse, or a statement of fact or opinion.

CHAPTER 7

THE YOUNGER GENERATION

I awoke on Friday morning to the sound of policemen in the house. The sound is quite unmistakable, at least to a policeman: heavy men trying to move discreetly. I poked my head round the bedroom door: hordes of them—down in the hall, up the staircase, on the landing. Hamnet was really intending to take the place apart.

McWatters brought me breakfast on a tray, a substantial and traditional bacon-and-egg affair. He was too sensible to apologize to me for the infestation of policemen. I ate well, then I shaved and dressed and went to see what was going on. If the police were everywhere, the family
was not: only Aunt Sybilla seemed to be around in the main part of the house. I expected her to be creating merry hell, but in fact she was sitting, robed and turbaned, in a small study off the hall, in pensive attitude, as if going through her Blue Period. I slipped in to have a word with Hamnet, and said I thought she was unusually quiet, given the circumstances.

‘Used it all up last night,’ said Tim in his phlegmatic way.

‘Bad?’

‘Incredible. Stood me out it was suicide, or accident, or possibly both. Said she was going to get on the phone to the Home Secretary who was a personal friend, but it turned out she was thinking of the last one but seven. But phew! I think she must be what they call a
grande dame.’

‘She’d like to think so,’ I said. ‘Did you get anything out of her in the end?’

‘Not a thing. As far as movements were concerned, she was in bed. No doubt they all were. As far as motive is concerned, she knew of nothing whatsoever. Everything was hunky-dory.’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘Can you imagine this lot living together and everything being hunky-dory?’

I told him about the hypothetically missing picture, suggested his searchers should keep their eyes open, pending more details, and then I drifted off into the grounds.

My idea was that, since it was a fine day, the Squealies might be playing outside, and that I might detach one of the older ones and talk to it in an uncle-like fashion, and perhaps get things out of it that a policeman could not. A pretty fatuous idea, actually, because they did not know me as an uncle and I do look awfully like a policeman. And anyway, as Tim Hamnet found out later, they are only to be detached from one another by the strength of three men. In any case, they weren’t in the grounds—I would have heard them—but I wandered around for a bit, partly
for old time’s sake, partly to see if anyone would spot me from the window and come out for a chat. I was just standing on the edge of a spinney down by the lake, now thick with weeds, when along came Mordred. I don’t know if he had seen me from the window, but he came purposefully, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, neat and dapper in a tailor-made suit, and looking as if he’d just washed behind both his ears, and felt all the better for it.

‘That’s the tree you fell out of when you were five,’ he said, pointing, ‘and that’s the lake you pushed me into when you were ten.’

He was full of beans, and doing none of the House of the Dead stuff. Still, none of them were.

‘What a memory you have,’ I replied in kind. ‘I can see you’re the family historian.’

‘For my sins,’ he said with a wry grimace. ‘And until some academic job comes up in somewhere other than Qatar or Abu Dhabi. The damnable thing is, what with the general family publicity mania and now this, if I did ever get the thing finished it would probably be a bestseller. It would sell better than Pete’s
magnum opus,
anyway.’

‘Pete writes, does he?’

‘What else?’

‘What on?’

‘Let him bore you with it. He’ll be delighted. I hear your wife’s coming tonight.’

‘Now, how in God’s name—?’

‘Calm down. I haven’t been listening in to your calls. I heard at the Marquis of Danby when I slipped down for a double Scotch last night. I can see why you don’t want them here, but do bring her up for a meal, won’t you?’

‘If she sets her mind on it, I don’t see how I can stop her,’ I said gloomily. ‘Short of its being one of Aunt Kate’s nights.’

‘She was on on Wednesday. It’ll be another ten days
before she’s on again. With a bit of luck even you will avoid her spinach blancmange.’

‘How do you stand it?’ I asked.

‘You mean the family in general, I take it, rather than the spinach blancmange?’ He considered for a moment—really, I thought, he is quite nice, and not unintelligent. ‘Well, I suppose the brute fact of the matter is that it’s better than teaching. Teaching in an ordinary school, I mean. Almost anything is better than that. So long as I’m part of the great army of the unemployed I can stand it here. I’m used to my Mama’s little ways, and as for the rest—well, they must appear appalling to you because you’ve been so long away, but I find I can put up with them.’

‘I hear you’re looking into this notion your mother has got that a picture has disappeared from the house.’

He raised his eyebrows to heaven. ‘Just what I was going to have a chat to you about last night. If it was only
one
picture, though . . .’

‘She thinks a lot have gone?’

‘Once she got the idea, she started thinking of things she’d known as a child—pictures, furniture, Great-Grandfather Josiah’s christening spoon, God knows what. Then she’d scream they were missing, cry blue murder—and then of course she’d find them and go quiet. On the Rampage and Off the Rampage, as Joe Gargery says. Personally I don’t know what to think.’

‘You mean not everything’s been found?’

‘No, alas: we’d get some peace if it had been. Of course, stuff gets lost, furniture breaks, things get given away. But certainly there seem to be things missing.’

‘What picture was it that set all this off?’

‘It was a thing by Holman Hunt, called
The Rustic Wedding.
A sort of companion piece to
The Hireling Shepherd.’
I shuddered. ‘Yes, indeed. I remember it dimly from childhood, and it too has greens that sear the
eyeballs. Which makes it odder that it can’t be found. Likewise a picture by William Allan entitled
Lord Byron Reposing in the House of a Turkish Fisherman After Having Swum the Hellespont.’