Death by Sheer Torture (17 page)

What was still more worrying was the feeling that she was quite simply holding back on me. That she knew something she was not telling. Knew what had been going on in this house, but for some reason or other—and I could think of some—was keeping mum. I didn’t like that. It was foolish, it was unsisterly, it was dangerous. One thing I was quite sure of: there had been a letter to me, and Chris knew about it. Why else hold back on the subject of her own letter from our mother? Something she had, according to Kate, burbled on about quite happily at the time she received it. The fact was, she must only recently have found out about my letter. Somehow found it and read it. And my letter, from Chris’s point of view, was obviously a hot potato.

When I got to my stateroom, I flushed the little pile of risotto from my bag down the lavatory, and cleaned my teeth vigorously to get the taste of Aunt Kate’s efforts out of my mouth. Then I went over to the desk, to the notebooks that had been sitting there since the night I arrived, and I scrawled ‘Peter, Peter, Peter—damn him!’ all over a new blank page. That relieved my feelings a bit. I sat down with the intention of being more rational, and I wrote: ‘Pregnancy—significant, or just carelessness?’ And then I asked: ‘Did Cristobel tell Father?’

But no train of thought could bring Cristobel’s pregnancy from being a side issue to occupying the centre of the stage. I could not see how the answer to the murder could lie there. I was just about to put down a query on the baffling subject of the letter and its whereabouts when
I glanced out of the window and saw Jan and Daniel being shown around the grounds by Sybilla and Mordred. They were near the tree where two nights before I had stood watching Maria-Luisa launch her marital missile, and they started off down towards the lake. Well, it was a lovely afternoon, and the fact is, I couldn’t resist. Damn the case, I thought: they’re my family. (Ignoring the fact that so was the case.) I went out to them.

Daniel—we seldom call him Dan, by the way, because Jan and Dan sounds like some ghastly cartoon film, with people who talk in funny voices—Daniel was capering around, beside himself with delight. The Trethowans went tremendously up in his estimation for owning such an enormous expanse of ground. And I could see his point. It was a pretty good feeling to know you could get all the exercise you could possibly need without danger from cars or muggers, and without passing beyond the confines of your own domain.

‘Daddy! Daddy!’ Daniel screamed as I came up. ‘I can run for miles and miles and not have to turn round!’

And he suited action to words. I strolled up to the little sightseeing party—Jan all modest and a-watch, like Elizabeth Bennet being shown over Pemberley—and I greeted the others and put my arm around Jan.

‘He loves the space,’ she said.

‘Children do,’ said Sybilla.

‘You like space too, Perry,’ said Jan.

‘Of course he does,’ said Sybilla. ‘He grew up here.’

I was beginning to get a nasty feeling of being accepted back in the fold.

‘Don’t the Squealies ever get out into the open?’ I asked.

‘Sometimes,’ said Sybilla, with a downward curve of her discontented mouth. ‘Sometimes they’re locked in the tennis court. But the eldest are beginning to be able to climb the fence. Today they’re all at the dentist.’

‘Poor things!’ I said. ‘I mean the dental people.’

‘They have to go to a new one each time. They’re known over a wide radius, and they’re having to be taken further and further afield. Luckily their mother cuts their hair herself. Now
this,
Jan, is the lake.’ (I have commented before on Sybilla’s capacity to state the obvious.) ‘This is the lake Perry threw Mordred into in the year ’fifty-eight. It was over there . . .’

As Sybilla seemed about to expatiate on this not-very-interesting topic, and still seemed to nurse a motherly sense of outrage, I took Morrie aside.

‘Mordred, I’m sorry —’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Perry. It was twenty years ago.’

‘Not for throwing you in, you ass. Since I was ten and you were sixteen I’m rather proud of it. For snapping at you this morning. The fact is, I’d got the idea that you’d done something, and now I find you hadn’t.’

‘Oh? Denuding the family picture collection?’

‘No—making my sister pregnant.’

‘Is she pregnant? That would be Pete.’

‘Yes,’ I said grimly. ‘That would be Pete. Did they make it that obvious?’

‘Not at all. At least, I never noticed anything. It’s just that it’s the sort of thing he does. Getting people pregnant makes him feel good.’

‘Well, if he must scatter his maker’s image through the land, I wish he wouldn’t do it via my sister,’ I said. ‘It makes me puke. It’s worse than when I thought it was you. Quite apart from anything else, what’s Maria-Luisa going to do when she finds out?’

‘Hmmm. If I were Chris I certainly would avoid coming to dinner on the nights when she’s cooking what my mama calls her delicious Mediterranean specialities. Though in point of fact it’s not the first time our little Neapolitan child of nature has had to face news of that kind.’

‘Really? Who else?’

‘Oh, there was the wife of a filthy-rich Yorkshire industrialist. Then there was the literary editor of the
New Spectator.’

‘So that’s how he got the job. Interesting variant on the old-fashioned interview.’

‘He likes the sort who are not likely to sue for maintenance. None of your barmaids or local peasant wenches for Pete. He’s very calculating where he dips his wick.’

‘Peregrine! Mordred!’ came the vulturine voice of Aunt Sybilla. ‘What are you so deep in converse over? I will not be left out, Peregrine. Tell me all. Have you found those pictures?’

We were at the far edge of the lake, not far from the summerhouse. We stopped, like tourists, to look back at that monstrous house, that heavy load of architectural pretension burdening the strong back of Northumberland.

‘Well, actually, yes, Aunt Sybilla,’ I said. ‘We’ve found the
Lord Byron,
anyway. It’s been . . . at any rate acquired, probably bought, by Newstead Abbey.’

Sybilla was ecstatic. ‘You see! You hear that, Mordred? I was right. You’ve all been mocking me, saying things weren’t
really
missing —’

‘Half of them were
found,
Mother dear,’ said Mordred.

‘Put back
! I was right all along. Somebody is dissipating the family heritage. Peregrine, I really think you have been
quite
clever. It may be we have been misjudging you a teeny bit all these years. So appropriate, too! What a Trethowan has dispersed, a Trethowan recovers!’

‘Well, we’re not sure of the legal —’

‘We shall demand it back. Of course. Now, perhaps if you’ve seen enough of the garden, Janet, we could go into the summerhouse and Peregrine can tell us
all.’

But I didn’t want that. I wasn’t going to be a police mole, feeding the gutter press through Aunt Sybilla.
Besides, I had seen through the thick skirting of shrubs a scrap of blue material in the summerhouse, telling me that Chris was there (she loves that sort of middling blue that suggests nothing so much as one of the Women’s services). Presumably she had not left the place since we spoke, or else had come back. Perhaps it had memories of a sentimental or erotic nature for her. Luckily the rest of the party was headed off by Daniel, who was gazing at the modified jungle stretching for miles beyond the lake in the direction of Thornwick and demanding (in a rather grand-seigneurial voice, I thought): ‘But I want to see it all!’

Sybilla rather reluctantly consented. ‘Perhaps we could go a little further. He is really rather a
nice
boy, yours, Peregrine.’

Of course I agreed. But with the current standards of comparison available to Sybilla, it was a bit like winning a gold at the Moscow Olympics. Jan obviously had not yet exhausted her curiosity any more than Daniel had, so I let them go off quite happily through the undergrowth and made my way over to the summerhouse. I was not welcome. As soon as Chris saw me she set her face in an obstinate line.

‘Go
away,
Perry. You’re hounding me. You promised you wouldn’t. I will
not
talk to you.’

‘Very well, then, I’ll talk to you, Chris,’ I said, sitting down beside her. ‘First of all, let me say I’ve been an absolute fool about the father of your baby, but you must admit you led me on.’ She looked mulish and kept her mouth shut. ‘Now I know it’s Pete, and of course that makes it much worse. Chris, you must leave this place. Adding another Squealy to the pack is really carrying wildlife preservation a bit far. Think of the fuss Maria-Luisa is going to make, and I can’t say I’d blame her. I thought you might want to stick around in the hope that he’d marry you, but now of course there’s no question of that —’

‘Who says there’s no question?’ Cristobel burst out. ‘There’s such a thing as divorce.’

‘Has that come up? Has he said he wants to marry you?’

‘He said wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could . . .’

Oh, my God! Don’t they teach you
any
thing in the Guides? I held my temper with great difficulty.

‘Right. That’s the first thing I’ve at last got straight in my mind. Now for the second. You received a letter, Chris, from Mother, sent by her lawyers, I’d guess on your twenty-first birthday.’ She looked obstinate, but shifty. She also looked scared of what was coming. ‘I think it very unlikely that Mother, when she was dying, would have written a last letter to you, but not one to me. I believe that a similar letter had also been sent to me, earlier, on my twenty-first birthday. It must have been sent by the lawyers to this house, where it was intercepted by Father—out of spite, or for some other reason. He could have destroyed it, but I don’t believe he did. Chris, I think you know of this letter, and I think you know where it is.’

‘You’re talking in riddles,’ said Chris shortly. ‘I’ve never heard of any letters.’

‘Chris, don’t be entirely dim. When you got yours you went around talking about it to people. Naturally. Everyone in the house knows you got it. I’ve only got to get on the phone to Mother’s lawyers to confirm it.’

‘I don’t know anything about any letter to you.’

‘I think you do. That’s why you lied about receiving one yourself. You knew I’d wonder why she hadn’t written to me too. Chris: she was our mother. We both loved her. I’ve got a right to know what she wrote to me. How would you feel if yours had been kept from you? Where is it, Chris?’

I could see that I had got to her. She had flinched when I spoke. But still she remained obstinately dumb.

‘Chris, what do the letters WOAF mean?’

‘I think they’re some kind of United Nations organization.’

‘God in heaven, Chris—Father didn’t send our mother’s letter to a United Nations agency! Come on: tell me what it means.’

But she would say nothing, and sat there obstinately looking ahead of her, her eyes wet but determined. When she gets that Christian martyr look on her there’s nothing can shift Chris. I spent a few minutes battering away at her silence, like waves on Beachy Head, but after a bit I had to give up. I stormed off. But it’s not very satisfying to shout ‘You haven’t heard the last of this!’ when you know you’ve been well and truly worsted.

I suppose it was this feeling of frustration that made me open up to the McWatterses when I found them in the hall. They were puzzling over a pile of wreaths that for some reason had been sent to the house. As it was by no means clear when my revered father (‘An Ornament to British Music’ as one of the wreath-cards put it) would be consigned to the earth, it was difficult to know what to do with them. Finally we decided to ring the family undertaker and get him to come and take them away. But when we’d done that we stood around in the hall for a bit, chewing the cud. McWatters was gently, courteously amused by the whole business, Mrs McWatters was displaying what is usually called a grim relish for the misfortunes of Harpenden.

‘Did either of you know,’ I asked, deciding this was one family secret it was quite useless to hide from the domestics, ‘that my sister was pregnant?’

They looked at each other. ‘Hmmm,’ said Mrs McWatters. ‘We had an idea that Something was Up.’

‘The summerhouse,’ said McWatters roguishly, ‘was becoming more popular than its attractions seemed to justify. Even in summer.’

‘I see. I guessed they might have met there. Do you
think my father knew about it?’

‘I’d take a wee bet—were I a betting man, which I am not—that he’d be among the last to hear. There was not much confidence between the young leddy and her father, particularly not in recent weeks.’

‘McWatters, Mrs McWatters, you can be frank with me: I really don’t count as a member of the family anymore. You must have overheard a lot of things in this family —’

‘Oh, aye,’ said McWatters.

‘Mek you hair currrl,’ said Mrs Mac, descending practically into the bass clef.

‘Always something going on,’ said McWatters. ‘And us being the only regular staff, not counting the leddies who came by day, we heard a goodly lot of it. I’ve often said to ma wife that a good book could be made of it. But my tastes run more to the visual arrts. And my wife’s religion teaches her to disapprove of fiction as lies.’

‘Then
what,’
I said, ‘was going on in the weeks before my father died?’

McWatters shook his head regretfully. ‘I get your drift, sirr, but as I had to tell the other policeman, I don’t rightly know. There was something, right enough. Of course, there was the wee matter of the pictures—you’ve heard about the pictures, I believe?’

‘Aye,’ I said. ‘Yes. Who would you think took them?’

‘We-e-ll,’ said McWatters, ‘I wouldna’ mek accusations, but talking it over, the two of us, we cam’ to the conclusion that, psychologically speaking —’

‘It was Master Peter!’ said his wife triumphantly. ‘Not a scruple in his body! As your puir sister has no doubt found out!’

‘I’m not quite sure she’s faced up to that discovery yet,’ I said. ‘But you don’t think the pictures were the root of the trouble?’