The Old English Peep Show (19 page)

Pibble hid the tumbler in a tuft of long grass in the corner of the wall, where no mower could reach. The evidence would be barely useful, but he was angry and he wanted to know who'd actually carried the liquor.

He couldn't think of a method of getting Mr. Waugh indoors, off the rheumatism-breeding turf, without asking Singleton for help. Ah, well, five minutes wouldn't make all that difference. First things first, and with a bit of luck the lit windows of the Kitchen Wing meant that the briefing was still in progress and everyone out of his way. The door to the colonnade was unlocked; dim bulbs shone amid the vines; but the Main Block was dark, and Pibble picked his way by torchlight across the Zoffany Room and into the enormous hall. The wetness of his shoes deadened their clacking on the resounding wood; at a real flat-foot's pace he crept soundlessly into the Chinese Room, rapt in a charade of stealth, and tiptoed across the carpet toward the case of weapons.

The label had been changed since the morning; and the dusty grenade had been cleaned and polished.

Now he was certain, though there was no way of proving it unless they found the bullet. The main thing was to make sure of the gun; he knelt to look at the lock of the case, a flimsy brass affair, and then stood his torch to shine downward through the glass. As he was levering the seldom-used screwdriver device out of his penknife, his throat was seized from behind. Madly he tried to use the leg-hooking technique he had been taught for dealing with an assailant from the rear, but his instructor had not dealt with the case of a man who was kneeling when the assault came. Expert thumbs, cold as stone, probed direct for the jugular. He wrenched at the hands as uselessly as a baby trying to open a stiff doorknob; then even the faint light from the torch vanished into roaring blackness. Harvey Singleton had outwaited his enemy again.

Light, when it came back, was a pale rhythmic flash accompanied by the clank of heavy metal and a rumbling sound. His neck was a woeful belt of pain, but when he tried to raise a hand to touch it he could not achieve even a half inch of play for the limb—he was encased in something stiff but soft.

He filled his lungs to yell and felt the same constriction on his chest. The yell came out as a poor affair, a mild croak—the strangling had unmanned his vocal cords. It hurt even to try to twist his head, but by straining his eyes to their leftward limit he managed to glimpse the moon before a black shape eclipsed it in time to the clank, then the moon again, eclipse and clink again, moon … The rumble must be wheels; even through the padding he could sense their uneven joggle. Then the moon edged slowly into full view as the vehicle took a curve, and he could see that it had been a head and shoulders pumping up and down which had caused the interruption of its light. Then the clank made sense, too. He was lying on his back on a hand-operated rail trolley; Harvey Singleton was pumping the long arm that propelled it along the rails.

“You'll never get away, with this,” Pibble croaked.

Singleton pumped on, silent, as remote from Pibble's pains and terrors as a liner must seem from dying men in a lifeboat who can just see its plume of smoke smudging the horizon. A straitjacket, a very luxurious one, encased his limbs, he realized—just the kind of handy gadget that was sure to be stored in one of the Herryngs attics: you never knew when one of your guests might not go killing-crazy halfway through a wet weekend; or perhaps it had been made to measure for some past Clavering in whom the family madness surfaced too violently for social comfort. Why hadn't Singleton simply tied him up? Answer, because the marks of the rope would show on his wrists and ankles. But the mark on his throat? Answer, it didn't bear thinking about; there was one obvious way of hiding a stigma like that.

“Did you kill Deakin?” he croaked.

Singleton stopped the trolley and opened the gates to Old England. He had to push the trolley for several yards before it had enough momentum to be driven again by the pumping handle. He stopped once more in another hundred yards and bent down to lift Pibble's rigid form across his shoulder, but in a moment of carelessness allowed their two heads to come close enough together for Pibble, despite the pang of twisting his neck, to snatch at the passing ear with his teeth, and get a good hold. With stolid patience—much the same as Pibble had earlier shown when removing the bramble from his own ear—Singleton laid him back on the trolley, their heads as close as if they had been lovers spooning under the big moon. Pibble ground his teeth, rejoicing in the taste of blood. Singleton's fingers felt for his damaged neck; they seemed to know their way about, and suddenly one of them pressed deep in under the ear to find its chosen nerve. Pibble's whole skull sang with agony. He opened his jaws.

Singleton straightened up and then bent out of sight again. There was a slow tearing noise and he rose with a strip of cloth in his hand which he used to bind around his head, with a wad over the bleeding ear. So there would be no trail of blood after all. He picked Pibble up as unemotionally as he had the time before, jerked his shoulder twice to settle his burden comfortably, and walked off along a flagged path. Pibble's head faced downward and with a shiver of unburied superstition he saw that Singleton was a monster, one whose monstrosity came by night and vanished again with sunrise: his legs ended in a pair of ballooning mushrooms, white, soft, obscene … No, he'd padded them with cloth to achieve an area of contact with the ground as broad as an elephant's foot—he'd leave no footprints at all. That's where he'd torn the strip of cloth from to bandage his ear. The path led down, breaking into steps every few yards. Each pace, each descent, shot its lance of agony through Pibble's neck, for his head was supported only by the bruised spine and mangled tissues. Singleton must have known, but cared as little for his victim's pain as he had for the chewing of his own ear, which must have hurt like hell. Pibble could still taste the blood of his enemy in his mouth, and wondered whether the pathologist would have the genius to spot it and diagnose an alien blood group. And what would Singleton do about his ear? Tooth marks are very distinctive. Cut it off? Very likely.

They stopped at another door; Singleton lifted the latch and bore him into a wider turfed area, a courtyard among buildings. Seven steps more and he laid him on a platform and rolled him over onto his back. Directly behind Pibble's head, a big beam reached toward the stars; at its top, supported by a small timber across the angle, the L-piece stood out sideways. From this dangled, just as in the silly little toy Miss Finnick had assembled, the summoning noose of the gallows.

Pibble felt his shoes being taken off. This seemed so extraordinary that inquisitiveness overcame the apathy of his fear and he contrived to move his head slowly to a position from which he could just see Singleton low down in the corner of his right eye. The man was leaning against the pillar of a moonlit cloister, removing the pads from his feet, and cramming Pibble's shoes on—they were at least three sizes too small. Then, carrying the pads, he walked with short steps straight toward the gallows, out of Pibble's line of vision. After a few seconds he appeared again, not carrying the pads but unwinding a ball of string whose other end was attached to a part of the gallows Pibble couldn't see; he led the string around a pillar and came back to the gallows, still unwinding it; this time be came straight up the steps of the platform and tied his end of the ball to the beam above Pibble's head. He moved out of sight and there was a longish pause before Pibble felt his shoes being laced back on again—any chance that a colleague would spot that it was a non-regulation knot, supposing it was? But Singleton was a devil for that sort of detail.

Next, after another short pause, a strange sensation at his fingertips which made him shrivel with terror at the thought that he was being prepared for some agonizing torture. It wasn't until Singleton had done four fingers that he realized that he was having his fingernails cleaned with the paint of a nail file in case any telltale fragment of skin was still there after the brief fight in the Chinese Room.

So this was to be suicide. The single set of footsteps following the path of the string and then leading straight back to the scaffold would show up under normal police investigation. Presumably the string was fastened to a lever which controlled the trap, and had to be led around the pillar because the lever worked in that direction. Singleton would stand him up, put the noose around his neck, stand beside him on the scaffold, and pull the string; when the long lump of meat and bone had stopped swinging, he would untie the straitjacket and leave the body dangling, the string draped into the trap hole and the triple course of footsteps to show the world how poor Jimmy Pibble, unhinged by the shock of his dealings with the General (they might even work things to show that he had been responsible for the hero's death), had melodramatically taken his own life.

Could it come off? Not if they brought the whole apparatus of forensic science to scrutinize his death. They'd find the place where the straitjacket had rested on the scaffold, the strained seams of his shoes, the depth of footprint made by a heavier man, even the faint and mysterious indentations where Singleton's huge pads had plodded across the lawn bearing the weight of two men. All that should be detectable, given the will, but it was a lot of work and bother for an open-and-shut case.

So it all depended on whether they thought Pibble was the type to crack and kill himself. Jimmy Pibble, a bit sensitive—highly strung, you might say—never had the basic drive to make a topflight officer, clever but quirky, wouldn't put it past him …

Suddenly, with a passion which detached him from the pain and fear of the horrid machine above him, he longed to know that they would put it past him.

“I am not that sort of person,” he gasped, in his ghostly whisper. Singleton hesitated in his manicuring and then moved on, silent, to another nail.

Mrs. Pibble, she'd know, surely. She thought him weak, unambitious, wasteful of his cleverness (which she absurdly overestimated), selfishly neglectful of her, but sane. She'd know he was sane. Too sane to kill himself, even as the last neglect of her. Poor Mary Pibble, she'd had a small, sour life, and she'd find it smaller and sourer tomorrow. And she wouldn't know what to do about the insurance, though he'd told her fifty times—but Tim Rackham would look after that.

But would Tim listen when she said that her husband would never have committed suicide? Four-fifths of wives say that anyway,
felo-de-se
being a distinct reflection on the inadequacy of a spouse to make the dead man's life worth living. What would Tim believe, whom he'd played chess with over beer and bangers and cheese almost every day in the last eight years on which their work had allowed them to lunch near their offices? Tim, who thought that any man's life was purposeless if he didn't find four noisy kids rioting about him the moment he got home?

And the Ass. Com.?

As Singleton levered him to his feet, taking care that his hard heels should not scrape along and mark the platform, Pibble found himself praying not to any God but to the Assistant Commissioner of Police, begging that official not to believe that Detective Superintendent James Willoughby Pibble was capable of the crime of self-slaughter.

Singleton, silent on padded feet, lifted him over to the noose; propped him up, and settled the rope around his neck.

“Stand up or you'll strangle,” said Harvey Singleton, in a detached voice. They were the only words he'd spoken.

He moved off the trap and untied the string. Pibble tried to gather the nerve to throw himself sideways and, at the cost of strangling, leave better pathological evidence of what had happened to his throat before the rope got there. The wrench of the full drop must obliterate all that—there'd been that case of the sergeant in Germany—so … But he couldn't do it. The muscles of his ankles, the only muscles which the straitjacket allowed him to move, clung despite his mind's bidding to their last three seconds of life.

Singleton jerked the string.

It snagged on the pillar.

He jerked again, but still the return length hung in its low catenary curve. Without even a cluck of the tongue at the tiresomeness of inanimate things, he retied his end to the beam and padded across the lawn to remove the obstruction. This time Pibble was in control of his ankle muscles, but a faint, absurd hope bade him stand upright.

Singleton reached the moonlit edge of the cloister and pulled the string to one side; it still held. He moved it up and down under slight tension, but achieved nothing. He couldn't afford to do much waggling, Pibble thought, without producing a suspicious abrasion of the string and fragments of thread caught in the wrong places on the pillar. Singleton seemed to think so, too, for he walked around to the next opening to loosen the string from inside.

Immediately he stepped into the shadow, there was a single sharp thud and he was tossed sprawling out across the grass. A squat gorilla-like figure pounced out of the cloisters onto his body; rolled it over on its front, straddled it, and with a rapid weaving motion lashed the arms together behind the back, then tied the ankles together, then ran another length of what Pibble knew must be camera strap between these two lashings and pulled it taut so that Singleton's body was bent back into a bow. Singleton didn't stir; the blow must have been well-aimed and vigorous.

Pibble felt the noose caress the side of his neck and realized with another bout of shock that he was swaying, giddy with fatigue and pain and relief, and with no possible leverage of limbs to regain his balance. He forced his ankles to move him gingerly back to attention and tried to call to his rescuer to hurry, but no sound came. However, the squat figure straightened from its task and trotted up the steps of the platform.

“It
is
Mr. Pibble,” said Mr. Chanceley. “I reckoned it was you, but I found it difficult to verify in this light. Let me have that cord off of your neck. What's this you're wearing?”