Death by Sheer Torture (9 page)

‘Christ.’

‘Exactly. But if I remember it rightly, it’s not something you could just tuck away somewhere.’

‘But you remember it framed.’

‘True. That’s a point. Anyway, the fact is that these, at least, seem to be gone. Then there are Aunt Eliza’s—that’s another problem. Nice old thing, as I remember her, but not the most methodical of women, and her will, I hear, was a mess. Who owns the ones that are here, were there more here when she died? The fact is, I agree there should be a proper inventory made. Because the security in the house is far from impressive, and it could be that any one of us is taking them off and popping them, one by one. As my dear mother, in her nice way, made us all very much aware.’

‘I gather it was suggested a professional might do the inventory.’

‘Exactly. Your papa’s bright contribution. Now, the advantage of this suggestion—you don’t mind if I abuse your papa, do you?’

‘Be my guest.’

‘Well, the advantage of this suggestion was that it
looked
as if your papa was keen to get the job done properly and insisting it be done by an outsider. And it
is
work for an expert, not for a dilettante like me. But the fact is, the expert could only deal with what is here now. He wouldn’t know a thing about what
should
be here but isn’t. So the proposal, to my ears, smelt just the tiniest bit fishy.’

‘I see your point. Or it could have been pure mischief-making.’

‘Of which your late papa knew a thing or two. Precisely. Anyway I did a bit of work on it, from the family papers
and that, but by then it had all begun to die down and I dropped it. I might have done more if Uncle Lawrence had been willing to pay me, but
that
would have been out of the question, knowing the dear old phoney.’

‘Are the family finances rocky?’

Mordred turned his eyes in the direction of the horizon: we could see Thornwick in the distance, and some prosperous housing estates of a private kind in between.

‘I don’t see how they can be, do you? It’s all ours, all that. Still ours. Lawrence should be bathing in the stuff.’

‘That’s not quite the impression given.’

‘You noticed the inclination to pinch the odd penny, did you?’

‘I never expected supermarket sherry in this house.’

‘Precisely. Though we’re all good children and say we prefer it. If you’d like a guess at the reason for all this, I’d say it’s because he hasn’t been able to bring himself to make the house and all the doings over to Pete.’

‘Of course!’ I said. ‘So the death duties —’

‘Will be colossal. The only time I ever remember the subject coming up, he muttered: “Heed the Bard. Remember King Lear.” I suppose he foresees himself being turned out into a Corporation old people’s home—our modern equivalent of the heath. I imagine he’s penny-pinching in anticipation of death duties—though that doesn’t quite make sense either, unless he’s salting it away somewhere secret. The fact is, Uncle Lawrence is only passing fond of Peter, but he absolutely dotes on the Squealies.’

‘So I noticed. He’s totally senile, I take it.’

‘Only so-so. He can tell a hawk from a handsaw when the wind’s southerly. Anyway, the fact is, it could be Lawrence putting the pictures up for sale, as is his perfect right.’

‘And being too embarrassed to say?’

‘Exactly. So what you’ve got here is either a fine old can
of worms, or conceivably a storm in a teacup.

‘Had all this caused much trouble—for example, between my father and Uncle Lawrence?’

‘Not that I noticed. There was no more than the normal quota of sniping, heavy ironies, double-edged innuendoes and so on—the usual currency of communication in this house.’

We had been walking through the golden trees, under falling leaves, and we now arrived back at the lawn behind the house. Mordred paused in the shade of a tree.

‘See that window in the Elizabethan wing?’ he said. ‘That’s Peter’s sitting-room.’

‘I know. I spied on him last night. I saw Maria-Luisa clock him with a whisky glass.’

‘Good for her. Now, in that window is my cousin—our cousin—Pete. And I bet you anything you like that if you walk across this lawn alone he will call you in and pump you for all you’re worth.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I know Cousin Pete. Inheritor of Harpenden House, and future head of the Trethowan family.’

He started off in the direction of the Florentine wing, but I caught his arm and kept him a moment longer in the shadow.

‘Morrie—if my wife comes here, can I rely on you?’

‘What? To see they all behave themselves?’

‘No—to make sure they don’t. I want her to see them at their worst. I couldn’t bear a big reconciliation, with family visits in the summer hols.’

‘I’ll do my best, but I should hardly think it will be necessary. With nerves all tensed up as they are now, anything can happen.’

With which prophecy of ferment Morrie trotted off happily in the direction of the Florentine wing—his tie as straight as when he had emerged, his shoes as spick and dust-free. There are some men nature can’t touch.

But he was dead right about Pete. Because I was just strolling, oh so casual, in the direction of the main block, when he appeared in his sitting-room window.

‘Oh, I say, Perry—’ I turned coolly. ‘I say, are you at leisure, or on the beat, as it were?’

‘Pretty much at leisure,’ I said.

‘Could I have a word with you, old man? Nothing frightfully important, but —’

I strolled over to him. ‘But—?’

‘But . . . I’d just like a word,’ he concluded feebly. He was in that denim suit again, which made him look ten years older than his real age. Have you noticed it’s only aging phoneys who wear denim suits? Well, it is, exclusively. This phoney had a bad bruise over his left eye, and I asked with concern: ‘Been in an accident?’

‘My marriage is one long accident,’ said Pete gloomily. The sound of the Squealies, playfully scalping each other several floors up, lent point to his remark. ‘I say, I’ll come round to the side door and let you in.’

‘Don’t bother,’ I said, easing myself up on to the window ledge and swivelling my legs round into the room.

‘Maria-Luisa’s all het up about security. Every door locked, and bolts on the one through to the main house. Crazy bitch. That’s what comes of being born and bred among the Mafia.’

Peter and Maria-Luisa’s sitting-room was a fairly comfortable affair, with a lot of ’thirties furniture retrieved from the main house, or perhaps left in this wing by Aunt Eliza. There was no great impress of personality on the room, however, unless it was the untidy scattering of books and papers around the place, which could have been strewn for my benefit.

‘Excuse the mess,’ said Peter perfunctorily. ‘This is the overflow from my study.’

‘I hear you write,’ I said. (I would never have dreamt, by the way, of giving him an opening like that if it wasn’t
that I knew I had to find out something about him and his life.)

‘Mmmm,’ said Peter. ‘At the moment I’m reviewing. A load of sex books, for the
New Spectator.’
He gestured towards the sofa, where lay a disorder of books, among them such surefire American best-sellers as
Sex and the Stock-Market
by Theodore S. Rosenheim and
Is There Sex After Death?
by Dr Philip Krumm-Kumfitt.

‘I’m pretty much the
New Spectator’s
sex man these days,’ said Peter contentedly.

‘Really?’ (Well, you think of a reply to that.)

‘What with that and the novel, I’ve got my hands full,’ he went on, with killing casualness.

‘Novel?’ I said, playing my part like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

‘Ye-e-es,’ said Peter, as if reluctant to speak of it, but since I’d brought the topic up . . . ‘A really big one, something on the scale of the old three-volume affairs.’

‘Have you got far with it?’

‘Oh, so-so.’ He gestured with his hands, as if to indicate a thick pile. ‘I write reams and discard a lot. Discard the whole time. I’m a perfectionist.’

‘What . . . sort of thing is it?’

‘Well, you know, novels today are all niminy-piminy little affairs, written by housewives between the nappy-changes, or academics in their summer hols. God! British novels these days are so unambitious! They’re positively anaemic.’

‘Yours will have blood, will it?’

‘I see it as a sort of sexual odyssey, if you see what I mean, combined . . . com
bined
with an enormous social conspectus, a sort of diagnosis of current social ills, get what I mean?
Bleak House
was the model I had in mind.’

‘I should have thought
Nightmare Abbey
might be a more appropriate model for someone living at Harpenden,’ I said.

He looked at me closely. ‘You don’t like us very much, do you, Perry?’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I only meant this house can’t be the most peaceful place for a writer to work in.’

Peter wagged a fat finger at me. ‘It’s having the leisure that counts, it’s not being a part-time writer. It’s
only
the old upper classes—the
rem
nants of the upper classes—that have the
time
to conceive anything really
big
these days. Look at your father —’

‘He never conceived anything bigger than a musical fart in his whole life,’ I protested.

‘Well, he was a bit different,’ Pete admitted. ‘What I meant was, he had
leisure.
He could
wait
on inspiration.’

‘He certainly waited,’ I agreed. ‘What was it you wanted to talk to me about, Pete?’

This chat was not going very well, and I wasn’t helping it to go any better. Wasn’t I supposed to be worming my way into their confidences? Hearing their artless, gushing confessions? I was hardly going to succeed in that if I made it so abundantly plain I couldn’t stand any man-jack of them. And my direct question had very obviously embarrassed Pete, who had clearly intended to come round to this topic via several B-roads, public footpaths and back alleys.

‘I just wondered . . .’ he muttered, ‘. . . you know . . . how the police were . . . regarding the case. How it was going . . . Whether they were getting any leads.’

‘You’ll no doubt have a chance to ask Superintendent Hamnet that yourself before long.’

‘Well, yes, that’s partly the point . . . You’re the expert, Perry. I was wondering how to approach that . . . interview. Wondering what line I should take.’

I raised my eyebrows. This really took the biscuit. What could one do but take refuge in cliché? ‘What can you expect me to say but that you should tell the truth?’

‘Oh, come off it, Perry. Don’t be so bloody Dixon of
Dock Green. There’s truth and truth. Now, take this suggestion that one of my kids may have done it.’

‘Ah! Whose suggestion is that?’

‘Oh, it’s . . . going around. Now, what line am I supposed to take on that, for example?’

He grinned, as if somehow he’d made a point I was incapable of seeing. ‘You don’t have to take any line,’ I said, exasperated. ‘All he’ll want to know is whether it could have happened. Could they have got out of this wing, for example?’

‘We
usually
lock them in their bedrooms,’ said Peter. ‘On the other hand, we sometimes forget.’

‘Did you forget the night before last?’

‘How should I remember? It was chaos that night. The suggestion hadn’t come up then.’

‘And Maria-Luisa? Does she remember?’

‘Oh, she’ll swear herself black and blue it was locked. She’d do that if everyone else had heard them rampaging through the house. Perjury isn’t a crime in Sicily: it’s a family duty.’

‘There probably wouldn’t be any question of perjury. The case could hardly come to court. They’re obviously too young to know what they’re doing.’

‘That’s rather what I thought,’ said Pete speculatively.

‘Unless, of course,’ I proceeded weightily, ‘someone put them up to it.’

Pete darted a sharp glance at me. ‘Oh, come off it. You’ve seen my kids. Can you imagine them doing something they’d been put up to?’

I spread out my hands. ‘Perhaps. If the idea appealed to them. If they thought it was fun. It might depend on their relationship with whoever it was.’

‘Meaning me or Maria-Luisa, no doubt. Hmmm. Yes, well I can see there are dangers in that line.’

‘Why,’ I asked nastily, ‘are you trying to take a line? What are you trying to cover up?’

‘I’m not trying to cover anything up, I’m just trying to get the whole silly business over and done with.’ He bent forward in his chair opposite me, in a gesture of intimacy I shrank back from. ‘Look, Perry: you know what your father was. He was an insignificant little troublemaker without an ounce of talent. I’m not particularly happy he’s been done in,’ (he said this rather quickly, as if he realized he was laying himself open) ‘but I’m not going to pretend I care a button either. Even if it was, say, McWatters or Mrs Mac. They do a good job, and we couldn’t cope if we lost them. If admitting one of the kids might have done it—and they might have—will get us back to normal so that I can get on with some work, then so be it. I still might, if you forget this daft idea they might have been put up to it, and if I can knock some sense into their silly cow of a mother. You know us, Perry. You can’t expect any conventional law and order stuff in this house.’

‘Even if it means leaving a murderer at large among you?’

‘I can take care of myself,’ he said, puffing out some flab.

‘Well,’ I said, getting up, ‘you’re obviously going to take your own way, whatever I advise. But I’ll tell you one thing: if it was one of your children, doing it in a spirit of youthful fun, you can be pretty sure Hamnet will find it out.’

‘Will he interview them?’ said Pete admiringly. ‘Christ, I wouldn’t be in his shoes.’

‘Obviously he’ll have to, since this has come up. I’m sure he’ll know the best way to deal with them.’

Pete narrowed his eyes: ‘What do you mean by that? I know you police: he’ll try and bully them into saying one of us put them up to it. I tell you, if he lays a finger on one of them, I’ll get my lawyer on to him and have him up for assault.’