The Old English Peep Show (11 page)

“Who told you that?”

“One of our party came before and she heard it then. Only the guide didn't mention it this time.”

“I hear they're finding it difficult to insure that particular lion.”

“That figures. Here's your pal come back—you reckon he'd let me scratch his ears while you photographed us?”

“Let's try,” said Pibble. “You'll have to show me how your machine works. I haven't got one.”

“You don't say?” said Mr. Chanceley, his voice wavering for the first time out of its
nil-admirari
flatness at this revelation of peasantlike non-affluence. “Well, all you got to do is aim at me through this window here, and when you got a good picture press this button here. Only secret is to keep cracking five times, as long as you think right. You got the shakes a mite, Mr. Pibble, so you better steady it against the tree. Nothing personal, sir—I had an uncle—but I'll tell you after.”

Pibble steadied the camera against the chill green-streaked bark and kept it whirring while Mr. Chanceley clawed vigorously at the back of the cub's head. The cub, lost in its lust of irritation, did not seem to notice the different technique; every few seconds Mr. Chanceley turned with a ghastly naturalness to study an imaginary bird over Pibble's head, or a viper at his feet, so that the whole of his solemn countenance should be visible on the pattering celluloid. At last the camera made its terminal fizz and click, and Pibble released the button. Instant on his cue, Mr. Chanceley left the lion in mid-purr and came eagerly back toward the tree. The first thing Pibble looked for as he lowered the camera was to see whether the man's neck was as exceptionally thick as it had looked through the view finder. It was.

“How'd it go?” said Mr. Chanceley.

“O.K., I hope,” said Pibble. “The tree hasn't got the shakes, and I kept going until the film ran out.”

“I shouldn't have said that,” said Mr. Chanceley. “My uncle, he was teetotal. He just had 'em natural.”

“Forget it,” said Pibble. “They come and go with me. I don't get them often.”

“Glad to hear it,” said Mr. Chanceley. “Here's my card. I'd like to send you a print of your scene, Mr. Pibble. You can borrow a projector, surely?”

“That's very kind of you,” said Pibble. “I'm afraid I haven't got a card, but I'll write my address down if you can wait.”

He tore a page out of his notebook, and was pleased to find that his hand was quite steady as he printed in block capitals the number of his house and the name of his street in Ewell. The shakes did not come back until he was thirty yards on down the path and looked up from Mr. Chanceley's card (whose business in Dallas turned out, appropriately, to be Photographic Research) to see a full-grown lion watching him through the mesh. The gaze was again that of the bored aristocrat, but Pibble had to stand still and wait for his glands to stop squirting their panic additives into his bloodstream.

It gave Miss Finnick a chill, enough to make her talk twentieth-century. It lived alone in the pit. It made the visitors waver like seaweed. It was said to be difficult to insure. It had lusted, crazy-eyed, after Pibble's flesh. Add to that that they'd been telling visitors about it in the past, but not now. And that Miss Finnick's stall—the nearest place to the pit—had been shut for the last three days and her wares moved down to the Abbey. Not much, but suppose …

Suppose the Claverings had decided to win their argument with Lord Bath by flying in a genuine man-eater (as they'd done with the cuckoos—and what about the General's reaction when he'd mentioned them?). And suppose they'd then hit the insurance reef (“Hello, Fred, I want cover for another lion.” “Fine, usual terms?” “Well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about—this one's a man-eater.” “I
say,
old boy! That's going to put the third-party rates up a bit. How'd you get hold of him?” “Asked Guffy Rickmansworth to look out for one—got that place in Kenya, yer know. Anaesthetic dart, crate him up, fly him in.” “Is that legal?” “Well, er, Fred—” “Now, look here, old boy, how often have I told you you're not still cutting corners on that blasted Raid. This company …” Just the sort of crazy caper the Claverings might expect to get away with.) So they couldn't go to town on the publicity—though the guides had been telling the visitors; but not this time, not this time.

Then suppose the Admiral dies—no mention of sickness—has an accident, gets killed by the lion in the course of his researches, like as not; and for some reason (a fancy fiddle with death duties? Account for the impersonation bit, anyway) they want to keep quiet about it, then, could they, conceivably, have decided to feed the body to the lion? How much meat in a nine-stone human body? Say six stone of meat, a stone of small bones for roughage, four full meals for a hungry lion. If he had the craving for man-flesh which the General had talked of at luncheon—and there'd been a line about it in Mrs. Adamson's first book (bless you both Elsas, and all your six feet)—then he'd not have gorged himself on horse meat; he'd be hungry. A stomach which can digest zebra hide should be able to cope with Harris tweed. It would drag the body under cover, bury the stomach contents, and start by eating the guts. In four days there should be nothing left except the larger bones, which they could collect and …

He stopped again, chilly with recognition. Those long bones he'd seen rattling into the meal grinder—too long for sheep, too thin for beef. Deer, conceivably, but … Crippen, the old boy had a nerve, sending his brother's shins down the trough to be chomped up into fertilizer, and complaining that they weren't dry enough! And he'd a better reason for impatience than senility, too.

Pibble was surprised by how little he wanted to go through with the business; if ever there was a family entitled to indulge in the private eccentricity of feeding each other to lions, it was the Claverings; he was sure the Admiral wouldn't have wished him to interfere. And it would be simple enough to accept the proffered explanation, stamp Deakin's death with his seal of approval, and leave someone else (Carl Spruheim, like as not) to find out someday that it wouldn't wash.

Picking his way into the undergrowth to skirt an impenetrably fallen tree, putting his foot into a quaggy area which sent half a cupful of stinking inky ooze between shoe and sock, stopping to extract the thorns of a bramble tendril from his ear, emerging onto the path to find nests of big burs already deep-set into his trouser, legs, he decided to give up. He sat on a stump to pick the burs out, and decided that the odds against his being right were at least four to one. And if he was wrong, who would forgive his nosiness into the private griefs of the great? Not the Claverings, not the Ass. Com., not Mrs. Pibble. The burs were ripe enough to fall to bits as he pulled at them, leaving crumbs of embedded particles which had to be picked out piecemeal and brought shreds of precious blue pinstripe with them. All very well to say he was retiring soon and could afford to take a risk, but who wanted to go out in a blaze of infamy? So be it.

But as he trudged dispiritedly up the sward toward Herryngs, he realized that he would have to go on. If he'd been sure, either way, he could have dropped it; but living another twenty years and not knowing—knowing only that he'd been too scared to find out—what sort of calm old age would that be?

The first cloud of the day suddenly filched the sunlight, and the gold glow left the stone façade. The horizon seemed to close in, and the House to look as monstrous as it really was, an alien mass leaning its elbows on the landscape.

4:35 P.M.

M
iss Scoplow was at the General's desk in the study, sorting papers out of a wire tray into a filing drawer. She looked up as Pibble came in.

“Gracious,” she cooed, with a pretty little movement of her eyebrows which did service for a frown, “you know you've missed your train, don't you? They couldn't keep the coaches any longer. And where've you been? You look as though you'd been exploring darkest Africa!”

“Well,” said Pibble, “there were a lot of lions.”

She laughed—she seemed deliciously easy to amuse, like a child with no complexes.

“I can't
bear
them,” she said, “but then I'm even frightened of cows. I adore Old England, though. Have you seen that yet?”

“Not yet,” said Pibble.

“Oh, but you
must,
it's absolutely super. Of course, I've only been here a fortnight, so I haven't had time to get blasé, but it really is terribly well done. The Abbey's so terrifically gloomy and old, and that sets the tone for everything, you see. I nearly fainted the first time I watched the hanging, and I'm absolutely sure the building itself
is
haunted. Sir Ralph says so, and the Bowling Green
was
used as a dueling ground several times, so really it would be almost more surprising if you didn't sometimes hear shots in the middle of the night.”

“And do you?” said Pibble.

“Well, it's difficult to be
sure
when you're not properly awake. Mr. Singleton teases me and says I hear what I want to hear, but I'm quite certain I heard something last week. Three bangs, but there's a terrific echo, you know, so it might only have been one and two echoes, but I remember it says in
Treasure Island
that ghosts don't make an echo.”

“I thought Long John Silver invented that to cheer the pirates up. He can't have been scientifically sure, I'd say.”

Miss Scoplow sat and stared at him with her round-eyed gaze.

“Goodness, how clever!” she said. “He must have been an extraordinary man to think of a trick like that when he only had one leg.”

Pibble laughed, and she joined in.

“Oh, dear,” she said, “I'm afraid I'm always saying things like that. What I
meant”
—and again the eyebrows rippled to denote concentration—“was that he must have been an extraordinary man to think of a trick like that in the middle of climbing up a sandy hill with only one leg.”

“You've got a good memory,” said Pibble.

“Yes, I have. I'm a first-class secretary, honestly. They pay me a London salary
and
they keep a horse for me, which is absolutely super. It's only that I
talk
like a ninny.”

“Is it a full day's work?” said Pibble. “Do you have to type out bits of Sir Richard's book, and things like that?”

“Yes, Mr. Deakin brings—brought me down a great bundle of paper all written out in most beautiful copperplate every day.”

“How's the book going?”

“It's all notes and quotations so far, and he seems to have got stuck for the last four days because there hasn't been anything. Do you know, lunch—luncheon today was the first real talk I've had with him since I've been here? Isn't he charming?”

“They're a very interesting family, all of them,” said Pibble. “Look, Miss Scoplow, I have to make a private call to London. Which telephone can I use?”

“Use this one. I've finished here, honestly. We're on direct dialing—shall I get the number for you?”

“No, please don't bother—I may have to chase my man around a bit. But could you apologize to anyone who was bothered by my keeping the coaches waiting? I've got about an hour's more work, so if someone will take me to another train in a couple of hours …”

“It'll have to be Southampton. I'll lay it on.” She smiled a sweet, diffident goodbye and left. Pibble was pleased to know that she wasn't in the plot; she moved in a quaintly old-fashioned aura of innocence, which the diseased air of Herryngs seemed unable to infect. He sighed over the telephone.

His man was at the third hospital he'd been passed on to. A secretary answered.

“Is that you, Jane?” said Pibble. “I want to ask Professor Alstead a few questions. Jimmy Pibble here.”

Mumble mumble went the telephone, click bonk.

“Could you ask me, Superintendent, and then I can shout the questions across to him and he can shout back? It'll save him washing his hands.”

Ah, Crippen, thought Pibble, that the secrets of Herryngs should be bandied through the formaldehyde air, across the trolleys of half-unseamed corpses, and in and out of the ears of morose attendants.

“I'm afraid it's rather hot stuff,” he said.

“Oh, all right, I expect he'd like a rest, actually.”

Bump click mumble mumble click bonk.

“Jimmy, this had better be good. I'm busy.”

“Sorry, Bill. I may be quite mad, but even if I am don't gossip about it or I'll be in really hot water.”

Grunt.

“Look, Bill, if I fed my enemy to a man-eating lion, and ground up the bigger bones in a bone-meal machine I happened to have handy, what traces would be left?”

“You serious?”

“Yes.”

“Blood and flesh traces, practically none. I've seen 'em eating in a game reserve, and they lick the bones damn clean—great rough tongues they've got—eat pretty well everything, too. Dig your bone meal into your cabbage patch—disperse it thoroughly—and you'd be safe there; it's only phosphate. Only thing I can think of is hair and bone splinters in the feces. You'd have to clean your bone-meal machine up damn thoroughly, though.”

“Is that all? They bury the stomach contents, I've read.”

“Useless, unless your enemy had been eating something peculiarly human and especially indigestible, O.K.?”

“Yes, thanks. I'll stand you a drink when I see you.”

“Two drinks. One for interrupting me and one for asking tom-fool questions. Jimmy?”

“Yes.”

“Take it easy, lad.”

Click. Br-r-r-r-r.

Bad as that? thought Pibble, staring at the names on the internal system: he could ring up Finnick, he saw. He could chat with her over the phone, and never even interview the lion in the pit. No. Bucket, shovel, and bait. And string. Gun? There were levels of madness, and he wasn't yet obsessed enough to go down into the pit if he failed to lure the lion into its cage and shut it in. Suddenly he remembered the soft brush and dustpan in Rastus's trailer: why would they want that sort of houseproud kit out there if they weren't going to clean the machine to unnatural specklessness? These grand old guys: they take a fancy to do something and it has to be done pronto—just like kids. He felt less mad again.

Elsa's kitchen was untenanted. He found a whole cold chicken in the fridge and put it into a yellow plastic bucket; it had been cooked in something peculiarly pungent. There was a ball of coarse brown string in a holder on the wall, which he took. What would the implacable Elsa say if he also made off with the handy little shovel for removing ash from the bottom of the Aga? He went next door and fetched the clumsier one from the dining-room fire irons.

Plastic is betraying stuff, more enduring than bronze and a world less weatherable. As he worked his way through the sparse cover of parkland trees toward the near side of the avenue, he had a fantasy about nicking an old wooden barrow from an outhouse, improvising hat and beard, tying string around his trousers, and trundling off on his adventure in disguise. As it was, the yellow bucket declared him alien amid the brochure-like serenity. He scuttled across the avenue and looked at his watch in the shelter of the further trees; he was already late for his appointment with Miss Finnick—he'd have to go across the Lion Ground instead of working around by the overgrown path.

The key was under its stone, which meant that the General must be back this side again. Presumably Miss Finnick went home another way—or did she live in the House? There had been an oddity about the way she'd referred to Mr. Singleton as “Harvey”—quite proper in an almost relation-in-law, but a little insistent, cozy … And why had Singleton picked the worst actress in
Who's Who in the Theatre
to bamboozle a professional detective? Memo: ask Spruheim what her reputation was and what his dealings with her had been.

The fresh outbreak of sun had not brought back the warmth of noon; Pibble felt chilly as he plodded along the path, wondering where the lions had got to. Slowly the chill deepened into unease, into near panic. He swung around. About fifteen lions, heads lowered, were following him along the path.

They stopped when he stopped, and three more came out of a thicket on his left to join the gang. They looked solemn, but not really menacing, and while he watched them they did not move. Pibble swallowed, turned around, and walked on; now he could hear the silken swish-swish of their passage through the grass—it seemed to be getting nearer, so he swung around again. They would have made world-class players at Grandmother's Footsteps, those lions; only one abstracted animal at the rear was not still by the time he could see them, causing a tiny flurry of growling and cuffing among the lions it had bumped into.

They
were
nearer.

“Off you go,” he said. “Good boys. Home.”

They stared at him, three-dozen yellow eyes, with quiet surprise. Then one of them—it looked very like the cub he had made friends with half an hour ago—pranced forward with a happy, half-sideways movement, as if it were slightly shy, and put its nose eagerly into the bucket. Pibble had just time to snatch the thing into the air above his head; the fire shovel teetered and fell, but with a fluky snatch he caught it left-handed. The cub, more pleased than ever with this excellent game, sat back on its haunches for a spring at the bucket, but Pibble banged it sharply on the nose with his shovel just in time to unsettle its leap, so that it bounced straight up like a firecracker, clawing at air, and then ran whimpering around to the back of the pack.

He frowned at the other lions like a schoolmaster quelling an outbreak of pellet-flicking, turned and walked on, glad to know that cold chicken was the equivalent of lobworm when it came to choosing lion bait. Swish-swish went the grasses behind him. His right arm tired in less than a minute, so he changed hands, shovel flailing. His left arm tired even quicker. He lowered the bucket onto his head, merely steadying it with his hand, and walked on in the attitude of one of those bearers cartoonists used to portray following Blimpish explorers through imaginary Africas. The lions, perhaps appreciative of this more familiar posture, closed in again until he could feel (in imagination, anyway) their hot and heavy and carnivorous breath thick on the backs of his knees. But he strode on austere (no hope could have no fear) until a black-and-tawny patch on the very edge of his peripheral vision moved farther forward and became the maned head of a lion at less than arm's length. Then the thought came to him that really he must look, with his pompous escort, much less like the cartoonists' figure of fun than a minor character on the fringe of a school-of-Rubens “Bacchus and Ariadne,” a nymph bearing a spare amphora for Silenus unperturbed by the welter of gamboling fauna. Carried away by the conceit, he reached out his right hand to place it on the lion's shoulder, but forgot that he was still brandishing the fire shovel. The lion, apparently impressed by the way Pibble had dispatched the too attentive lion cub, shied away, barging into what looked like the senior lion present. Pibble had turned his head for his abortive maneuver, and saw the enormous yellow fangs bare as the old lion snarled at his clumsy subordinate, which quite removed the savor from his joke. He returned to striding on austere.

When he reached the far gate, he was confronted with a hitch in the hitherto smooth logistics. He could see the stone under which the key must be kept, reachable from both sides of the fence, but he couldn't go and grovel for it without leaving his precious chicken prey to the lions. After a moment's thought he decided to tie it to the fence above the gate while he got the key out; he put the shovel in his mouth, reached into the bucket with his free hand for the ball of string, found the loose end, and, on tiptoe, knotted the handle clumsily to the wire at the extreme limit of his stretch. Just as he had made the knot fast, an enormous weight caught him between the shoulder blades, slamming him into the gate, accompanied by hideous pain; he stayed still and endured, unable even to drop the shovel from his mouth because it was jammed between his cheek and the wire. Something began to clatter above his head; he worked his neck backward until he could see the bucket bouncing to and ho under the blows of a fulvous paw—one of the lions had become bored with waking, and was using him as a convenient leaning post which might help it to get at the chicken.

There came a slight relaxation of the pressure and he squirmed sideways, unsettling the lion so that it dropped and he was able to back himself against the gate, snatching the shovel as he turned. He raised it like a householder stalking a bluebottle with a fly swatter, and the lions eyed it speculatively, as if they were working out the potentialities of the weapon. They backed away. He lowered the shovel and began to edge toward the stone. They closed in toward the bucket. He raised the shovel and returned to guard the chicken. They backed away. Impasse. His shovel arm ached through its whole length and his back sang with pain.

“Be you all right, zurr?” said a soft voice over his shoulder.

“Do I look it?” he snapped. “Unlock the gate but don't unlatch it and then go back to your stall and shut the door, in case I make a mess of getting out of here.”

“I do be carrying a mortal gert firearm, zurr,” said the voice. There was a pause and a click; then the gate began to move behind him. He hadn't realized how hard he'd been pressing against it.