Ancestral Vices (22 page)

Yapp got out and listened, but apart from the slop of the river and the occasional birdsong there was silence. No one about. Good. The next five minutes were not. The late Willy Coppett not only stank to high heaven but he also showed a marked disinclination to leave the boot. His little shoes caught under one side while he adhered to the floor in several places so that Yapp had to grapple with him rather more closely than his stomach enjoyed. Twice he had to give up the struggle to retch into the bracken and when he finally managed to drag the body from the boot he was horrified to discover that Willy had died not solely from injuries caused by a blunt
instrument but also by the insertion of an extremely sharp one. This was brought home to him when the point of the knife protruding from Willy’s back jabbed Yapp in the stomach so painfully that instead of carrying the corpse onto the bridge before dropping it into the river he let go of it on land and watched with horror as it rolled slowly down the bank into the water.

Even then Yapp’s panic was not abated. His lack of experience in disposing of dead bodies in rivers had led him to suppose that they sank. The late Willy Coppett didn’t. He drifted slowly away downstream, snagged his jacket for several seconds in an overhanging bush, was twirled round by the current, collided with a log and finally disappeared round a bend.

Yapp didn’t wait. Thankful that he was no longer the driver of an obviously illegal hearse, he got back into the driving seat of the old Vauxhall and drove back the way he had come with the slightly comforting thought that in two hours he would be in his rooms at Kloone and could have a bath. But as ever with his theories, reality proved this one wrong. An hour later two miles out of Wastely the Vauxhall came to a halt and the engine stopped. Yapp tried the starter twice without success and then noticed that the petrol gauge read empty.

‘Shit,’ said Yapp with uncharacteristic violence and got out.

At Number 9 Rabbitry Road Rosie Coppett had returned from her shopping expedition in that same state of mental uncertainty in which she lived her life unless there was someone around to make up what there was of her mind for her. Since Willy’s mysterious departure she had relied on Yapp, and had gone on with her daily routine telling herself that the Professor would know what to do about finding Willy as soon as he got better. But the letter on the hall table, the cheque for three hundred pounds and, worst of all, his empty room finally convinced her that he too had deserted her. Rosie took the cheque and the letter into the kitchen and looked at them both with pathetic bewilderment. The enormous sum of money he seemed to be giving her didn’t make sense to her. After all, he had refused her offer of extras and she hadn’t done anything more for him than she would have done for any other lodger and here was three hundred pounds. What for? And why did he write that he would get in touch with her as soon as it was proper to do so and sign his letter ‘Yours most affectionately, Walden’? Slowly but with dim determination she grappled with the pieces of this puzzle. The Professor had come to stay and had paid more than she asked; he had refused her extras but had said he liked her and had comforted her by holding her hand and she had known that he meant it; Willy had disappeared without a word of warning two days later; and now the Professor, who had been so ill, had gone too, leaving her all this money. He had also left the letter
from Miss Petrefact unopened and finally the shirt she had so thoroughly washed in a vain attempt to get the bloodstain off it was still hanging on the clothes line where she had hoped the sunshine would bleach the stain away. She was alone with Blondie and Hector and they couldn’t tell her what to do.

She got up from the kitchen table and made a pot of strong tea like her mum had told her to when anything nasty had happened. After that she ate several slices of bread and dripping, all the while wondering where to turn to for advice. The neighbours wouldn’t do. Willy would be ever so cross if she went to them and told them he’d gone away, and the Marriage lady wasn’t any good either. She’d told her to leave Willy and now Willy had left her she’d say it served her right and it didn’t. She’d always been a good wife to him and nobody could say she hadn’t and it wasn’t right to tell wives to leave their hubbies. Which brought her to the Vicar, but he was all hoity-toity and didn’t stop to chat to her when she left church like he did with other richer ladies, and besides, he’d made them say they would never leave one another and, now that Willy had, he’d be angry and wouldn’t let Willy sing in the choir like he used to. There was really no one she knew she could go to.

In the end she remembered Miss Petrefact’s letter which the Professor had never opened. She wouldn’t like Miss Petrefact to think she hadn’t given it to him. She’d better return it. And so, drawn all unknowingly by the custom of deference to the Petrefacts, she put all the bits
of paper and the envelope in her bag, left the house, passed sadly through Willy’s collection of garden gnomes whose rigor he now shared, and trudged off in the direction of the New House.

Half an hour later she was seated in the kitchen there telling an interested Annie, who had nothing better to do than string runner beans, all her troubles.

‘He left you a cheque for three hundred pounds? What would he want to do that for?’ said Annie, who had been most interested in the story of the bloodstained shirt on the very night Willy Coppett hadn’t come home. Rosie rummaged in her bag and brought the cheque out.

‘I don’t know. I don’t even know how to put it in the Post Office savings. Willy always does that.’

Annie studied the cheque and the letter that had been in the envelope with it. ‘“Yours most affectionately, Walden,”’ she read out and looked at Rosie Coppett suspiciously. ‘That doesn’t sound like a lodger. That sounds like something else. He didn’t try to get up to anything with you, did he?’

Rosie blushed and then giggled. ‘Not really. Not like you mean. He was ever so nice though. He said he was very fond of me and respected me as a woman.’

Annie looked at her even more doubtfully. She couldn’t remember any man, let alone a professor, telling her that he was very fond of her and as for respecting Rosie Coppett as a woman when the girl was clearly a half-wit, the man who said that must definitely have been up to something not at all nice.

‘I think Miss Emmelia ought to see this,’ she said, and before Rosie could protest that she didn’t want to get Willy or anybody into trouble Annie had gathered the cheque and the note and taken them through to the front of the house. Rosie sat on absentmindedly stringing the rest of the runner beans. She felt very nervous but at the same time she was glad she had come because she didn’t have to think what to do any more. Miss Petrefact would know.

Twenty miles away Willy’s body slid over an old weir, swirled in the foam for a few minutes, bumped its way through some rocks and swept on. It was coming back to Buscott, but it never arrived by water. Some small boys playing in the shallows by the Beavery Bridge spotted it and ran along the bank in awful excitement; when Willy was thrust by the current against the trunk of a fallen tree they were there to drag him by his little feet into the side of the river. For a few minutes they stood in frightened silence before scrambling up the bank to the road and stopping the first car. Half an hour later several policemen had arrived and were staring down at the body and the CID in Briskerton had been informed that the body of a presumably murdered dwarf, unofficially identified as William Coppett, had been discovered in the Bus.

‘You mean to tell me that Professor Yapp left the house this morning without telling you, and that you found this letter and the cheque waiting for you when you came home from shopping?’

Rosie stood in the drawing-room of the New House and mumbled, ‘Yes, mum.’

‘And don’t call me mum, girl,’ said Emmelia. ‘I’ve had enough of that from Annie over the years. I am not your mum.’

‘No, mum.’

Emmelia gave up. She had had a trying day and had been busily and uncharacteristically using the telephone to the leading members of the family to inform them that a family council was called for, and she had heard too many objections of one sort or another to be in a good mood.

‘Did he say where he was going?’

Rosie shook her head.

‘Did he say anything about the Mill?’

‘Oh yes, mum, he was always going on about it.’

‘What sort of things did he say?’

‘What the pay was like and what they made there and such-like.’

Emmelia considered this unpleasant confirmation of what she already knew and was more than ever convinced that a family consultation was needed.

‘And did you tell him?’

‘No, mum.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know, mum. Nobody ever told me.’

Emmelia thanked God and ignored the reiterated implication that she was Rosie Coppett’s mother. The girl was quite evidently stupid and to that extent it was exceedingly fortunate that Yapp had chosen so uninformed a landlady. If that was all he had chosen; the cheque and the note signed ‘Yours most affectionately, Walden’ suggested a less abstemious and, to Emmelia’s way of thinking, a positively perverse relationship. And what on earth did he mean when he said he would get in touch with this mentally deficient creature ‘as soon as it was proper to do so’? She put the question to Rosie, but all she could say was that the Professor was a proper gentleman. Having seen Yapp for herself Emmelia had reservations on that score, but she kept them to herself.

‘Well I must say it all sounds most peculiar to me,’ she said finally. ‘However, since he’s given you this money I see no reason why you shouldn’t keep it.’

‘Yes, mum,’ said Rosie, ‘but what about Willy?’

‘What about him?’

‘His going off like that.’

‘Has he never done it before?’

‘Oh no, mum, never, not in all the years we’ve been
married. Comes home for his supper ever so regular and if it’s not ready he gets so cross and I . . .’

‘Quite so,’ said Emmelia, who had more important things to think about than the domestic habits of a dwarf and his overweight wife. ‘In that case you had better go to the police and report him as missing. I can’t imagine why you haven’t done so already.’

Rosie twisted her fingers together. ‘I didn’t like to, mum. Willy gets ever so fierce if I do things on my own without telling him.’

‘I can hardly see how he can possibly object if he’s not there for you to tell,’ said Emmelia. ‘Now then, be off with you and go straight to the police station.’

‘Yes, mum,’ said Rosie and followed Annie back to the kitchen obediently.

Seated at her bureau, Emmelia tried to put this distressing interview to the back of her mind. She had the arrangements for the family council to make and she had yet to decide where to hold it. The Judge, the Brigadier-General and her Dutch cousins, the Van der Fleet-Petrefacts, had all stated their preference for London while Osbert, who owned most of the Petrefact holdings in Buscott and much of the countryside around, combined her own love of obscurity with a fear amounting to a phobia about being denounced as an absentee landlord if he so much as set foot outside the district. But there was a more telling reason in Emmelia’s mind for holding the meeting in Buscott. It would save her the embarrassment of having to explain in detail the exact
nature of the objects being made at the Mill. They would be able to see for themselves how imperative it was that the renegade Ronald must be forced to stop Yapp’s researches before the name Petrefact became indissolubly connected in the public mind with dildos, merkins, handmade Male Chastity Belts and French Ticklers. One glimpse inside the Mill would prepare the Judge to commit murder without a second thought, while the Brigadier-General’s obsession with Seal-Pointed gerbils would dwindle in an instant. No, the meeting must be held here in the family house in Buscott. She would put her foot down. And what was more she would insist that the meeting be held the coming weekend. That way no one could object. Even the Judge didn’t try people on Saturdays and Sundays.

In the reassuringly aseptic surroundings of his rooms at Kloone University Walden Yapp undressed and took a bath with Dettol in it. He had had a horrid journey back from Buscott, had tramped two miles to get a can of petrol from a garage and had had to endure several disconcerting remarks about smells, first of his clothes and then of the old Vauxhall, by the man who had driven him back to the car. Yapp had tried to explain them away by saying he had recently visited an activated sludge dump but the garage man had said it reminded him of something in the war and after several minutes’ silence
had gone on rather too appositely about the whiff of dead bodies in Monte Cassino where he’d fought. But at least he had provided enough petrol to get Yapp back to the garage to fill up and then drive back to Kloone without interruption.

Now in his antiseptic bath he considered his next actions. He would certainly have to do something about his clothes before the cleaning lady came in the morning, and just as certainly he had to clean out the boot of the old Vauxhall. But there were more abstract considerations to deal with and when he had dried himself, put on clean clothes, put the Willy-polluted ones in a plastic dustbin bag and sealed the top, his mind turned to food and Doris. He made himself a bowl of muesli as being both vegetarian and nourishing, sat down at the computer terminal and dialled in.

On the screen in front of him the comforting figures appeared in that private language he had so carefully devised for his communications with Doris. He was back in his singular world and could at last confide in a brain whose thinking matched his own. There were things he had to tell it – in fact now that he was no longer under the pressure of desperate action it occurred to him that perhaps Doris could help. Munching his muesli he contemplated the screen and made a decision. A full confession of his activities in Buscott, the times and dates on which he had done things, or on which things had happened to him, would definitely clarify his mind while
at the same time providing Doris with that data from which she could, as a wholly unbiased observer, draw equally unprejudiced conclusions.