Authors: Tom Sharpe
‘I am
not
well,’ he snarled. ‘In fact I am in exceedingly poor health, but I can assure you I have no intention of dying at your convenience. I am more concerned with the history of the family.’
‘And so are we,’ said the Judge, ‘no question about that.’
A sympathetic murmur of agreement came from the group. Lord Petrefact ran a dry tongue round his mouth. Their assent was the last thing he had expected or wanted.
‘And you’ve no objection to Professor Yapp working on it?’
For a moment Lord Petrefact’s eye seemed to catch a slight hesitation but the Judge dashed his hopes. ‘I understand he’s some sort of radical,’ he said, ‘but I daresay his bark’s worse than his bite.’
Lord Petrefact tended to agree. If Yapp’s presence in Buscott had done no more than generate this bizarre
friendliness among the family, he hadn’t bitten at all. ‘And you’re all agreed that he be given full access to the family correspondence?’
‘Don’t see how he could write the book properly without it,’ said Randle, ‘and I daresay it will sell well too. Osbert here was just reminding me of Uncle Oswald’s stratagem for getting the Japanese contract for the floating dock. Apparently he persuaded Aunt Georgette to slip into the Nip’s room one night on her way back from the loo and . . .’
Lord Petrefact listened to the story with growing apprehension. If Randle was prepared to have that sort of stuff published he was prepared for anything. Again the dark suspicion that he was being conned flickered in Lord Petrefact’s mind. ‘What about Ruskin Petrefact’s penchant for goats?’ he asked, dredging from the mire of family gossip the foulest predilection he could find.
‘As I was told it, he preferred them dead,’ said Osbert. ‘Warm, you know, but definitely slaughtered.’
Lord Petrefact gaped at him and the knuckles clutching the arms of the wheelchair whitened. Something had gone terribly wrong. Either that or they were humouring him in the hope that he would never live to see Yapp’s scurrilous history published. He’d soon scotch that hope. ‘Then since you are all agreed perhaps it would be as well for us to draw up a new contract with Professor Yapp, a family one, which you would all sign, conceding him full access to any document or information he requires.’
Again he watched for dissension but the Judge was
still beaming jovially and the others seemed to be as unperturbed as before.
‘Well, Purbeck, what’s your answer?’ he demanded brusquely in the face of that irritating smile. But it was a new voice that answered him.
‘I hardly imagine Professor Yapp will have much opportunity to continue his researches into the family, Ronald dear.’
Lord Petrefact swivelled his head lividly and saw Emmelia in the doorway. Like the others she was smiling at him, but there was nothing genial about her smile; it was one of triumph and malign glee.
‘What the devil do you mean?’ he asked with as much menace as he could muster in so contorted a position. Emmelia said nothing. She stood, smiling and emanating a composure that was even more alarming in its way than the family’s welcome.
‘Answer my question, confound you,’ shouted Lord Petrefact and then, unable to keep his head screwed over his left shoulder a moment longer, turned back to the Judge. Purbeck’s expression was hardly enlightening. He was staring at Emmelia with as much amazement as Lord Petrefact felt himself. So were the others.
It was the Brigadier-General who repeated his question for him: ‘Er . . . well I mean . . . what do you mean?’
But Emmelia was not to be drawn. She crossed to a bell and pressed it. ‘Now why don’t we all sit down and I’ll tell Annie to bring us tea,’ she said, seating herself
with the air of one wholly in command of a slight social occasion. ‘How good of you to put in an appearance, Ronald. We’d have been quite lost without you. Ah, Annie, you may serve tea in here. Unless . . .’ she paused and looked at Lord Petrefact, ‘unless you’d prefer something a trifle stronger.’
‘What the hell for? You know damned well I’m not allowed . . .’
‘Then just the tea, Annie,’ interrupted Emmelia and leant back in her armchair. ‘Of course one tends to forget your ailments, Ronald dear. You look so wonderfully youthful for an octogenarian.’
‘I’m not a fucking oct . . .’ he began, rising to the bait. ‘Never mind my age, what I want to know is why you’ve got it into your blasted head Professor Yapp won’t write the family history.’
‘Because, my dear,’ said Emmelia, having savoured the suspense, ‘he would appear to have . . . how shall I put it? . . . Let’s just say that he has more time on his hands than would seem—’
‘Time on his hands? What the hell are you blathering on about? Of course he’s got time on his hands. I wouldn’t have hired the fellow if he hadn’t.’
‘Not
quite
the time you’d expect. I believe the word is a stretch.’
Lord Petrefact goggled at her. ‘Stretch?’
‘A stretch of time. I think that’s the vernacular for a long prison sentence. Purbeck, you’ll know.’
The Judge nodded vacuously.
‘You mean this Yapp blighter’s . . .’ began Randle, but Emmelia raised a hand.
‘Professor Yapp has been arrested,’ she said and smoothed her skirt in the serene knowledge that she was pushing Lord Petrefact’s blood pressure up into the danger zone.
‘Arrested?’ he gargled. ‘Arrested? My God, you’ve nobbled the brute.’
Emmelia stopped smiling and turned on him. ‘For murder,’ she snapped, ‘and I’ll have you know that I do not frequent race courses and nobbling—’
‘Never mind what you fucking frequent,’ yelled Lord Petrefact, ‘who the hell’s he supposed to have murdered?’
‘A dwarf. A poor little dwarf who did nobody any harm,’ said Emmelia, taking a handkerchief and rendering the news even more distressing by dabbing her eyes with it.
But Lord Petrefact was too dumbfounded to notice. His mind had switched back to that terrible evening at Fawcett when Yapp had manifested an unholy interest in stunted things, and particularly in dwarves. What had the sod called them? Pork? Something like that. And now the maniac had gone and murdered one. In his own mind Lord Petrefact had no doubts. After all it was precisely because the swine was capable of causing havoc wherever he went that he’d sent him down to Buscott. But dwarficidal havoc was something else again. It would
mean a trial with Yapp in the witness box saying . . . Lord Petrefact shuddered at the thought. It was one thing to threaten the family with publicity but quite another to be personally held responsible for sending a dwarf-killer . . . He shut off the thought and looked at Emmelia, but there was no comfort to be found in her gaze. Suddenly everything fitted together in his mind. No wonder the fucking family had been so pleased to see him and so ready to cooperate on the history. Lord Petrefact came out of his frightful meditation and turned from Emmelia to the others.
‘I might have guessed,’ he shouted hoarsely. ‘Of all the double-dyed swine you take the cake! Well, don’t think I’ve finished. I haven’t—’
‘Then I wish you would,’ said Emmelia sharply. ‘It’s too tiresome to hear you ranting on, and besides, you’ve only yourself to blame. You sent this extraordinary man, Yapp, down here. You didn’t consult me. You didn’t ask Purbeck or Randle—’
It was Lord Petrefact’s turn to interrupt. ‘Croxley, back to the car. I’m not staying here another minute.’
‘But what about your tea, Ronald dear?’ asked Emmelia switching to sweetness. ‘It’s so seldom we have a family reunion and . . .’
But Lord Petrefact had gone. The wheels of his chair crunched on the gravel and the family sat in silence until the hearse started.
‘Is this true, Emmelia?’ asked the Judge.
‘Of course it is.’ And she produced the
Bushampton Gazette
from her bag. By the time they had all read it Annie had brought the tea in.
‘Well, that’s a merciful release, I must say,’ said the Brigadier-General with a sigh. ‘It’s put a stopper on Ronald. I’d stake my reputation on the fact that he doesn’t know what’s been going on at the Mill. Never seen him in such a tizzwhizz since he heard Aunt Mildred had left him out of her will.’
‘I tend to agree with you,’ said the Judge, ‘but it’s not only Ronald we have to consider. The point is, does this murderer Yapp know about the Mill? If he should raise the matter in court . . .’
‘I daresay you’ll use your influence to see that he doesn’t,’ said Emmelia.
‘Yes . . . well . . .’ murmured the Judge, ‘naturally one will do what one can.’ He took a cup of tea and sipped it thoughtfully. ‘Nevertheless, it would be useful to know if he made any mention of the Mill in his statement. Perhaps it would be possible to find out?’
That night, the first of many for Yapp who lay in his cell trying to order out of horror and chaos some doctrine to explain why he was there, and finding only an incredible conspiracy, the Petrefacts, gathered round the dining-table in the New House, began that process which was to justify his theory.
‘I should have thought it would be easy enough for you to find out if the man Yapp made any mention of
what’s been going on at the Mill in his statement,’ said the Judge, addressing himself to Emmelia.
But for once Emmelia displayed no interest in the family’s concern. ‘You can always ask Frederick. He’s bound to be in the Working Men’s Club at this hour of the night. For myself, I’m going to bed.’
‘Shock’s probably hit her badly,’ said the Brigadier-General when she had left the room. In his way he was right. The shock of discovering that the family she had protected for so long could desert her, and were in fact a collection of craven cowards, had changed Emmelia’s outlook entirely. She lay in bed listening to the murmur of voices from the room below and for the first time found some sympathy for Ronald. It was exceedingly little and consisted more of a shared contempt for the rest of the family, but in the scales of her mind it tipped the balance. They could deal with the problem themselves. She had played her part and from now on they must play their own.
And so for the moment they did. Towards eleven Frederick arrived with the comforting information that Yapp’s statement, as relayed to him by Sergeant Richey, whose wife was in charge of plastic underwear, contained no reference to the Mill other than that it was undoubtedly a sweat-shop.
‘You don’t think he’s making an oblique reference to
those chamois-lined camiknickers?’ asked Mrs Van der Fleet-Petrefact, who had taken a secret liking to the garments. ‘One would undoubtedly perspire rather profusely . . .’
‘Or the thermal agitator perhaps?’ suggested her husband.
The Judge looked at Frederick with undisguised disgust. He was wondering if the brute was wearing a merkin. ‘Well?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Frederick, ‘I mean his solicitor’s been to see him and he’d have mentioned something about it if Yapp did know.’
‘True,’ said the Judge. ‘And what is the name of his solicitor?’
‘Rubicond, I think, though I don’t see what that has to do with the case.’
‘Never mind what you don’t see. The legal profession is a brotherhood and a word dropped . . .’ The Judge sipped his port thoughtfully. ‘Well, we must just hope for the best and let Justice take its natural course.’
And Justice, of a sort, did. On Monday Yapp was brought before Osbert Petrefact in his guise as chief magistrate and two minutes later had been remanded in custody without bail. On Tuesday Judge Petrefact, in passing sentence on a school caretaker for indecently assaulting two teenagers he hadn’t, gave it as his considered opinion that acts of violence against minors and small persons
such as dwarves must be stamped out before the Rule of Law collapsed entirely. The caretaker went down for ten years.
But it was in Lord Petrefact’s newspapers that Yapp was most fiercely, if anonymously, condemned. Each carried an editorial pointing out that dwarves were an endangered species, a minority group whose interests were not adequately catered for or, in the case of his most respectable paper,
The Warden
, that Persons of Restricted Growth deserved better of a supposedly caring and concerned society than to be treated as ordinary men and women and ought accordingly to have shorter working hours and disability pensions. By Thursday even the Prime Minister had been questioned on the human rights of dwarves and Common Market regulations in regard to the grading of individuals according to size, while a Liberal backbencher had threatened to introduce a Private Member’s Bill guaranteeing proportional accommodation on public transport and in all places of entertainment.
In short the presumption that Willy Coppett had been murdered by Professor Yapp had been firmly implanted in the public mind to such an extent that a protest march of dwarves demanding protection against assaults by Persons of Excessive Growth was seen on television proving the contrary of their case by routing a police contingent sent to prevent them from clashing with a large body of women campaigning for Abortion For Dwarves. In the ensuing mêlée several women had
miscarriages and one teenage dwarf, having been disentangled from beneath the skirt of an extremely pregnant woman, was rushed to hospital as a premature baby.
Nor was that all. Behind these televised scenes more sinister moves were being made to discredit Walden Yapp and to ensure that his trial was as short as possible, his conviction certain, his sentence long, and that his evidence contained no mention of the Petrefact family. By that evidently telepathic influence which so informs the English legal system, Purbeck Petrefact remotely controlled Sir Creighton Hore, QC, who had been briefed by Mr Rubicond. The eminent counsel honourably refused the offer of a judgeship, but took the hint. In any case he had already decided it would be an act of legal folly to allow Yapp to be cross-examined in the witness box.
‘The man’s clearly as mad as a hatter and the case of
Regina
versus
Thorpe and others
establishes sufficient precedent.’
‘But can’t we simply plead insanity?’ asked Mr Rubicond.
‘We could, but unfortunately Broadmoor’s taking the case and he’s not given to accepting any proof less than the McNaghten Rules.’