Death by Sheer Torture (7 page)

After that rather unsatisfactory conversation with my wife I went up through the green baize doors and into the main part of the house. McWatters was just entering the dining-room as I passed through the hall, and I wondered whether he’d been listening in on the hall extension. Then I went up the great staircase (which seemed to have been conceived for corpulent fin-de-siècle monarchs to make an entrance down, arm in arm with their consorts) and to my bedroom. Dear Aunt Sybilla had told McWatters to put me in my old room, but he had had the sense to realize I would not much want a room in the Gothic wing, even had the police allowed it, so I’d been given the principal guest bedroom in the main block—an enormous room, inevitably, big enough to erect a circus tent in, with its own bath and shower and, of all things, John
Martin’s
The Destruction of Sennacherib
taking up most of the inner wall. I have grown up with nineteenth-century painting, it’s very much part of me, but still I decided that
The Destruction of Sennacherib
was not under present circumstances the kind of interior decoration best calculated to cheer the faltering spirit. Alas, there was no question of taking it down, or turning its face to the wall. I walked round the room for a bit, tut-tutting at the thought of Jan’s and Daniel’s arrival; I got out my notebooks (part of my personal equipment for a case) but wrote nothing in them; then I decided to go along and have my talk to Cristobel.

Cristobel, after her hysterics, had been put in another guest-room only three doors from mine—hardly more than the length of Liverpool Street Station away. I tapped on the door. There was a long pause, and I stood picturing her there, frightened out of her wits. I had just reached down to open the door and put her out of her misery when there was a small ‘Come in.’

She was lying in bed, very white against the sheet, and in that big room oddly and unusually small. She managed a frightened smile.

‘Oh, hello, Perry. Is it you? I’m glad you’ve come.’

‘Hello, Chris. How are you, old girl?’

‘Getting over it. I hope to be up and about tomorrow.’

(Up and about is the sort of phrase Chris uses. She probably barges round the Guides’ camps bellowing ‘Rise and Shine’.)

‘Don’t you think about getting up yet. There’s nothing you can do: the police have taken over the whole wing. Just you try and make a proper statement to Hamnet—he’s the CID man—then stay put where you are.’

‘The CID? Then it’s definitely murder?’

‘Oh yes, I’d say so. But you knew that, didn’t you?’

Chris shook her head. ‘I didn’t know. I just couldn’t believe—I mean, who would do anything like that? I
mean—
like that?’

‘Somebody, my lass. So we’ll just have to face up to it. Would you like to tell me what happened?’

‘I suppose I can try, if I’ve got to tell the—
them,
tomorrow. Well, I went up to bed at my usual time.’

‘When’s that?’

‘About half past ten. I have to get up early to do most of the housework before Daddy gets down. Got down. Anyway, when I went to bed, Daddy went . . . downstairs. To . . . well, you know. When he did it, it was always after I’d gone to bed, in case I was disturbed by the . . . bumps. He was awfully considerate like that.’

Charming olde-worlde courtesy, I thought. But I just nodded.

‘Well, about a quarter past twelve I . . . er . . . still hadn’t got to sleep —’

‘Why?’

‘No reason, I just hadn’t. And so I came down to the kitchen to get an aspirin or something. It’s on the first floor of the wing, you remember, and you can . . . hear. And so I heard, and I thought: this isn’t right. He
never
did it for that long. And I ran downstairs into the Gothic room and —’

‘Were the lights on?’

‘Yes, very bright. And I saw —’

She stopped, sobbing, and I sat on the bed and put my arms around her, like I did when our mother died. Eventually she calmed down and wiped her eyes.

‘Did you notice the cut cord?’ I asked.

Chris nodded. ‘I dashed over and switched the thing off, and it—he—came down with a last bump and he seemed about six inches away and it was—horrible. I screamed and ran out of the wing into the house, and screamed and screamed.’

‘Who came out to you first?’

‘Oh dear. McWatters, I think. Did you know he wears a
nightshirt? Oh no, you don’t know him. Then Mrs Mac. Then—Mordred, I think, and later Sybilla.’

‘What did they do?’

‘Someone—McWatters, I think—ran to the Gothic wing, then dashed back and called the police. He told them to bring a doctor, but he must have known . . .
I
knew.’

‘I see. Then they put you to bed?’

‘Yes. They tried slapping me, and water, but Mordred said it was barbaric and the doctor would be here in a minute. So they got me to bed, and I don’t remember much more. Eventually I talked a bit to the police, but I kept —’

‘I know. Well, it’s over now. Perhaps Hamnet won’t need to talk to you again about that. I’ll report back to him. Chris, what had things been like in the family recently?’

‘Oh, you know, much as usual. We each lived in our own wings, but still—it isn’t an easy house to live in, Perry.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘But I don’t complain. It’s always the way, isn’t it? The men go off and do the glamorous and exciting jobs and the women get left behind looking after the older generation. It’s always been like that and I suppose it always will be.’

Hmmm, well, I thought. I’d been getting stuff like this in letters from my sister recently, showing, I suppose, that this kind of lowest-common-denominator feminism has at last filtered down into the kind of magazine my sister reads. As the bandwagon grinds slowly to a halt, my sister hears of the movement. Now, the fact of the matter is that my sister stayed home with my father because she had no aptitude for any kind of interesting job and wanted to inherit what was going. Highly sensible reasons, of which I heartily approve, but no basis for a
good feminist whine. My great-aunts, daughters of the redoubtable Josiah, may not have had much choice, but Chris did, and made it. And if anyone by some laughable contingency had offered Chris a glamorous and exciting job, she would have cast a pall of the humdrum over it within hours of signing on. Still, this wasn’t quite the time for saying things like that.

‘You say it wasn’t easy. What especially do you mean? Had there been any rows, any big problems?’

‘Nothing out of the ordinary, really. Aunt Kate has been very odd since her breakdown, as I suppose you’ll have noticed.’

‘Yes. But hardly
odder.
Better on the whole, I thought.’

‘Perhaps. But you never know where you are. What else? Oh, people were always complaining about the Squealies. Then there was a great fuss over some picture or other —’

‘Oh?’

‘Aunt Sybilla was going to redecorate one of the guestrooms. You know she sometimes feels her artistic talents aren’t stretched to the full these days.’ (When my sister says things like that there is not a hint of irony. I have heard her refer to our father as a great composer. She is a true Trethowan.) ‘She went looking for something that was put up in a lumber-room when they first hung Aunt Eliza’s pictures of the family in the drawing-room. But you know how it is. That was twenty-five or thirty years ago. They couldn’t find the picture.’

‘I see. What was it?’

‘I don’t know. Rossetti, or Holman Hunt, or somebody.’

‘Did she think it had been stolen?’

‘Oh—you know: she went around saying it was very
odd,
and telling Mordred he ought to do an inventory of the whole house—as if poor Morrie hasn’t got enough to
do with the family history. It would take years. Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t turn up, in some room or other.’

‘Very likely it will. There must be some nobody’s been in since the builders moved out. So Father wasn’t really at the centre of any of these rows, was he?’

‘No, not really. He sort of stirred things up, now and then. Helped them along. Of course, it’s awful to say things about him now he’s dead . . .’

‘If you don’t, we’ll probably never find out who did it.’

‘No. Well, he said he thought we should get somebody qualified to do the inventory—implying poor Morrie wasn’t, and that was a red rag to Aunt Sybilla. In any case, it’s almost all Uncle Lawrence’s property, in fact.’

‘And he didn’t want an investigation?’

‘Oh, I think he did say it would be a good idea. But then I suppose he had one of his days, or something. Anyway, one way or another the whole idea got forgotten.’

‘Chris, you’ve been with Father these last fifteen years. He wasn’t an easy man to get along with, I know. Which of the family would you say hated him most?’

Chris thought for a bit. ‘Well, I suppose you, Perry.’

‘Apart from me,’ I said impatiently. ‘Let me tell you I have an absolutely cast-iron alibi, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.’

‘I wouldn’t say anybody actually hated him,’ said Cristobel, resuming her pensive pose. ‘It sounds so melodramatic. I mean, he and Maria-Luisa sometimes had words about the Squealies. They’re lovely children, but they must have been particularly trying to someone
musical,
don’t you think? And Mordred was a
little
bit put out when he wanted the professional art-historian in to do the inventory. Nothing more than that. He and Syb jogged along much as they always did.’

‘And how did you get on with him, Cristobel?’

‘All right. We went our own ways. I did most of the cooking and cleaning in this wing, but I had a lot of free time. I have the Guides and that. And I’m great friends with the vicar’s wife, and I sing in the choir. He didn’t interfere. Most of us in this house go our own ways, you know. On the whole it works very well.’

I got up with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction.

‘There’s precious little to go on so far. Precious little in the way of possible motive. It just seems senselessly cruel and pointless.’

‘Senseless? Do you mean a . . . a lunatic might have done it? Someone from outside? Or Aunt Kate?’

‘I wasn’t pointing at Aunt Kate,’ I said. ‘If she did it, I’d bet it was for a very good reason. Well—you’d better get some sleep now, Chris. I’ll pass all this on to Hamnet, to spare you as much as possible tomorrow. If I were you I’d stop there and get a bit more of your strength back.’

I kissed her and moved over to the door. It was just as I was opening it that Cristobel came out with her most interesting idea so far.

‘Perry,’ she said, ‘has it occurred to you that one of the Squealies might have done it? In play, I mean?’

CHAPTER 6

NIGHT PIECE

I went back in and closed the door.

‘Do you think that’s possible, Chris? Could they have got through the house without being seen?’

‘I think so. It’s a big house, and we each live in our separate wings. You can hear people coming miles off and get out of the way. Uncle Lawrence would be the one they’d be most likely to meet, and you can certainly hear
his wheels. Anyway, he’s often in Kate’s wing these days—he certainly was last night. She’s the one who looks after him.’

‘Kate implied they often got out.’ (I realized this sounded like caged animals, but so be it.)

‘They do. Not all that often, but they do. Mostly they play together. They’re not . . . terribly well behaved.’

‘So I noticed. They struck me as complete monsters. But do you think one of them might actually —’

‘Well, of course, they wouldn’t
realize
what they were doing. It would just be in fun, they’d think. But they are
awfully
naughty sometimes. They just don’t think.’

‘Do you think anyone could have used them? Put the suggestion into their minds? One of their parents . . . ?’

‘Oh Perry! Of course not! Nobody could be so
wicked
as to use a little child like that!’

Poor innocent Cristobel! I saw I had distressed her. ‘I expect you’re right,’ I said. ‘Now you get a good night’s sleep, Chrissy, and I’ll see you in the morning.’

I went back to my room. I didn’t feel ready for bed yet, and certainly not for sleep. I showered in a luxurious flow of water (none of your miserable modern trickles for Harpenden House) and soaped vigorously, as if to wash off the slime of such a homecoming. That was marvellous, but it was while I was doing it that my mind, still over-active, started to grapple with an odd feeling of dissatisfaction—something niggling away at the back of my mind that refused to come forward, you know how it is. Of course the whole day had not been of the sort to make me pirouette for joy, as you will have gathered, but there was something else—something that had not been quite . . . it was something, yes—that was when the feeling had begun—something connected with my talk with Cristobel.

It was while I was towelling myself down that it came to me: she wasn’t relieved enough that I had come.

Now don’t get the wrong idea about this. I suppose
you’re thinking that this is a big
macho
thing on my part: he wants little sister to sob on his chest and say ‘Now you’ve come, Perry, I feel safe,’ and all that stuff that flatters the male ego and may have some truth in it or no truth at all. He thinks she should have made him feel tough and capable and in control.

No, it’s not that at all. But I know Cristobel, and just think yourself of the situation: here is a girl, not very bright or very confident, who has just found her father murdered in a peculiarly horrible manner; she is surrounded by nuts whom she cannot find very congenial or put any great trust in; along comes a brother, a policeman, whom she is fond of and who is (on the surface) pretty sure of himself and who ought to be a pillar of strength and reliability to her. You would expect her to be pleased, to feel a load off her mind—in short, to be relieved.

Now, I think Chrissy was pleased to see me as a person. And yet . . . I pinned it down: I wasn’t convinced she was pleased to see me as a policeman.

And that was odd, and thought-provoking, and disturbing.

For some reason my mind went back to a talk I’d had with Cristobel ten years or so before. It was while I was still in the army, when I was thinking of going over to the CID. And it was four years after I had flung myself out of this house, shouting at my father that he was a dirty-minded, sadistic mediocrity. I was giving Chris lunch in London, and I could see that she was lonely and unhappy, and rather nauseated by my father’s tastes and habits. I urged her to get a job, but she resisted, and I could see that she was counting on the money from Father—such as it would be—to give her some kind of independence when he died. Anyway, I was a bit upset by her position in the house, and I actually suggested I try for a reconciliation with Father, so that I could visit her
more often.