The Old English Peep Show (5 page)

“That looks good,” said Pibble.

“It has to be,” said Mr. Singleton. “Americans understand about meat.”

There was a stone passage on the far side of the kitchen, with little round-topped doors opening off on the right every few feet; Mr. Singleton unlocked the fourth and Pibble followed him in. It was like stepping out of mellow October into black frost.

“There he is,” said Mr. Singleton. “If you have finished before I come to fetch you, perhaps you would be kind enough to wait in the Chinese Room. The light switches are here. I will shut the door to keep the cold in. It opens from the inside.”

“Fine,” said Pibble. The door, thick as a strong-room hatch with insulation, swung shut with a breathy plup. He was entombed with the suicidal coxswain.

The light was garish. The dead man lay on a marble shelf, his eyes shut, the contours of his face (such of them as were visible through a Sealyham-like sprouting of white whiskers) relaxed into the strong lineaments of death. Pibble hated bodies; it wasn't squeamishness, but a sense of intrusion into a particularly bleak intimacy, and the facial changes always added to this feeling. With the disappearance of the shifting minute-by-minute animation of the moving blood, you saw the real, enduring character emerge in coarse lines like a caricature. The mouths harshened; the bones of the nose declared their nature; the intricate patterning of wrinkles resolved into a bold, interpretable ideogram.

Deakin's dogginess had resided not only in his whiskers; all his features were small and sharp, like a terrier's. The grisly process of hanging had even cocked his head inquiringly to one side, as though his last thought on earth had been a desire that someone should throw a stick for him. The contents of his pockets lay in a neat pile above his head, banal and uninformative. His shoes were old but glossy with ten thousand polishings. His hands were square and calloused, and in a cracked nail was a thread of what might have been hemp from the rope he used to hang himself.

Pibble stared at the waxy face and tried to imagine Mr. Singleton applying the kiss of life through all that hair. The chill made him feel detached, ruminative, just as the mild warmth through his carriage window had earlier that morning.

I am being conned, he thought. I am a tiny figure in some larger drama of theirs, simply here to be gulled and sent home, more momentary and peripheral even than loyal old Deakin. I must do my duty by God and the Claverings, certify this suicide, touch my cap, and depart. Anyway, it is a certifiable suicide, not quite unfakable but as near as makes no difference. You'd have to make him unconscious, lift him with the noose round his neck almost to the ceiling, drop him—it'd take at least two. Drugs would show in the autopsy, and so would the bruise of a knockout blow. Memo: see that stomach contents are analyzed.

Or you could hypnotize him—which is what they're doing to me, dangling their glittering life in front of me and letting it swing slowly to and fro, until I can only gasp, yes, yes. At the instant of arrival there is honeyish Mrs. Singleton in her dottily beautiful car, sent specially to meet me when they could easily have told the coaches to pick me up, and prattling away as if I were an old friend. Then Sir Ralph bowls me a dolly, watches me cart it for six, and records his admiration for posterity. Even Harvey Singleton, the rapid reader, for whom all time is composed of instants in which the profit motive can operate, tells me more than he need and stages a moment of soul-baring at the study window. “Stages” is the word. Memo: go and stand on the gravel and look whether a man driving away could actually see watchers behind glass a story higher.

What else? (He was now so cold that Deakin's whiskers took on the appearance of hoarfrost.) “I can't think how we'd have coped if
all this
had happened a couple of months ago.” And then that leaky explanation about it being terribly upsetting, and making it difficult to keep a proper eye on things. What else had she been doing with Mrs. Chuck and Claire and Mr. Waugh, for heaven's sake? And then Mr. Singleton had claimed that Deakin's death was not trivial to
them, even at this stage of the season:
rum epitaph for a faithful servant. And the Singletons had told different tales about who'd insisted on calling in Scotland Yard, though Singleton himself might have said “we” for the sake of family solidarity. Memo: ask why Deakin was making a model landing craft. And why was Singleton whispering?

It wasn't much. (He sighed, and his breath hung mistily in the icy air.) Apart from the Claverings' assumption that the rules didn't apply to them—getting a wallah down from London, shoving the corpse in here, not allowing anyone to bother about an autopsy, freezing out the local police—there was only one genuinely odd thing: Singleton had heard a noise of drumming, but Deakin's neck had been broken clean, and his shoes and the cupboard door had been unmarked, though both were so polished that they looked as if a fly's footsteps would have scarred them. When a man hangs, he drums his heels—in literature; in fact he can only achieve that last tattoo if he's bungled the job and is strangling. But if you're inventing a story you put the drumming in because it feels right.

Not enough to bother a prosecutor with, or anyone else. Still, there was another rum thing about the wallah from London: that Tom Scott-Ellis and Harry Brazzil, the two most eager blue-blood suckers in Scotland Yard should have been joint favorites in the Herryngs Stakes—several other chaps had been far less busy. And then, with as much fuss as a big bank robbery would have warranted, it had been Pibble who'd been sent, quiet, easy­going Jimmy Pibble, whose main achievement in life had been to lever himself out of the upper-lower-middle class into the lower-middle-middle­, despite the handicap of an overrefined wife—just the man to buy a social gold brick for its shiny outside, they'd thought. (No, not fair to the Ass. Com., who couldn't have known about the gold brick. It would just have been put to him, in grunts and half sentences, that an officer with some respect for his betters would be more welcome to the Claverings. They had chosen their own vulture, and specified one who didn't like the taste of lion.)

Crippen, I'm cold, he thought, but did nothing about it; stared at the blind face of the corpse and wondered why the Chichester Theatre had felt like a social gaffe. They ought to be used to gaffes, ride them as easily as a liner taking a ten-foot wave. Answer, he'd asked a question they hadn't prepared an answer for.

O.K., so he was being conned, and there was nothing to do about it. Make a fuss, ask tiresome questions, insist on formalities, and they'd all (including the Ass. Com. and Brazzil and Scott-Ellis) assume he was trying to spin the Herryngs paragraph in his book out into a Herryngs chapter. There was nothing to go on, except the drumming noise and the smell of being conned (sense of smell thanks to the exquisitely patient process of moving from upper-lower-middle to lower-middle-middle); so stay conned. Perhaps hint to the Ass. Com. of his unease (given the luck of catching him in the lift or something—no formal request for interview) and let
him
carry the ghostly load of responsibility. Otherwise let sleeping lions lie. A good policeman never has hunches, his first boss, Dick Foyle, used to say.

Gloomy with the foreknowledge of self-betrayal, Pibble turned to the door. His heart bounced in irrational panic as he walked toward its safe-like solidity: they'd locked him in to die freezing, while eighty Americans chumped knowledgeably through bleeding steaks not twenty yards away!

But the latch was on the other edge of the door, hidden in a triangle of shadow, and the door opened smoothly. He turned off the light, shut Deakin back into solitude, and stood shuddering with cold in the flagged passage. Cold and shock. He had believed them capable of it—they
were
capable of it, dammit.

O.K., he was going quietly. But let them stretch his conscience one notch further and the lion would feel the talons of this vulture, blunt, bourgeois talons though they were.

12:25 P.M.

T
he Chinese room was empty except for its trophies. Pibble mooned about, gazing halfheartedly at this and that: here a scrap of tarnished fabric from the Field of the Cloth of Gold; there a side drum which had been one of those not heard at the burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna; here an invitation to a soirée at the Hell-Fire Club; there fragments of birch twig rescued from the flesh of some previous Clavering after a thrashing at Eton.

He stopped, astonished and outraged, in front of a case of exhibits from the St. Quentin Raid—mainly weapons, all modern and apparently in good working order: the Sten which Sir Ralph himself had carried; the long-barreled Colt .45 with which “Dotty” Prosser, the Raid's posthumous V.C., had wiped out two nests of machine gunners guarding the submarine pens; a captured Skoda automatic; the famous but now dusty grenade which had failed to explode when it landed in the middle of the Raid's command group; Sir Ralph's sketches for one of his big booby traps; and so on. There must be a dozen gangs in London, not to mention several thousand semi-psychopaths up and down the country, to whom this lot would seem worth more than even the lovely Romney of Miss Hester Clavering which smiled with sweet eighteenth-century blankness immediately above the deadly collection. And deadly they looked, ready to go bang-bang or rat-a-tat this instant and mow down the revolting plebs—there was even a round of grayness where a drop of fresh oil had fallen onto the typewritten label of the Colt, so carefully was everything maintained in its lethal perfection.

Ah, hell, what was the point in being outraged? It was just typical Clavering, the assumption that pleas to hand over weapons to the police didn't apply to
them.
To school himself into the mood of going quietly, Pibble turned away and walked across to inspect the bronze Epstein bust.

Seen close, it was a delicious piece of work. Pibble had always associated an element of caricature with these portraits—shaggy Shaw rendered as an intellectual goat, saintly Einstein haloed with his own hair. This time the artist seemed to have chosen as Sir Richard's chief characteristic a deliberate mildness, a balanced sweetness of mind, which he had interpreted into bronze, treating the willing metal with less than his usual fierceness so that the modeling of even the ear lobes seemed to be part of a central douce harmony.

Curiously, the big-joke Dali above the bust shared some of its qualities, for here, too, smoothness reigned, painstaking and glossy. But beneath the sheer patina of varnish wallowed all the Surrealist furies; Sir Ralph's face was purple and twisted with Goya-like rage, and his scarlet uniform was shown as a series of half-opened drawers full of corpses tumbled together like odd socks.

“Many of our visitors, especially the Germans, admire it considerably, sir,” said a voice at Pibble's elbow. Mr. Waugh had glided in, silent on the moss-thick carpet, and now stood in a beautifully calculated pose of haughty subservience.

“Can I get you anything, sir?” he added, and the disguise became marginally less complete: there was that in the actor-butler's­ intonation which made it clear that the apparently limitless possibilities of “anything” began and ended with a stiff drink.

“No, thanks,” said Pibble. “Do you know if the Doctor and Sergeant Maxwell have come?”

“I believe so, sir. Mr. Singleton is talking to them in the Zoffany Room.”

This time the faltering of tone was more marked. Pibble decided to risk a timid probe.

“Mr. Singleton must pay the most fantastic attention to detail,” he said.

“Too sodding right he does,” said Mr. Waugh rancorously. “Rings up Dick Looby at the Spotted Lion and asks him how much I had last night. Dick's a decent fellow, but he can't afford not to tell him. I tell you, that's the way to drive a man to secret drinking—I've seen it happen in long runs again and again—and Mr. Singleton thinks he can do it to
me.
Got me by the short hairs, he has; knows I'd never find another billet like this, any more than he'd find someone else to do the Beach bit—you read Wodehouse?”

“Yes,” said Pibble. “Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes.”

“Right,” said Mr. Waugh. “I can do that, too: worth a guinea a visitor to Mr. Bleeding Singleton, I am. But he thinks he could scrabble along without me and he knows I couldn't do without him. He's got me by the knackers.”

“I suppose nerves are always a big frayed by the end of the season,” said Pibble cautiously.

“First time I've noticed it,” said Mr. Waugh. “July, August, that's the time for tantrums, but by now everything ought to be slack and easy. Why, you heard how sharp Miss Anty spoke up to me this morning. 'Tisn't like her, Officer. Something's
up
.”

Mr. Waugh's voice was now an urgent whisper. During the last short speech, layers of saloon-bar knowingness had peeled off his voice until he spoke with the direct appeal of the peasant, petitioning Authority (baffled, inadequate Pibble) to simplify the unfair mysteries of the universe. A faint bloom of sweat, a condensation of tiny globules, dewed the melon-structured tissues of his brow and jowls.

“Is it something to do with Deakin's death?” said Pibble. “I hear he was a bit of a womanizer, for instance.”

“Him?” said Mr. Waugh, astonished back into the saloon bar. “Only woman old Deak would've taken an interest in was one made of knot-free deal, so he could've gone over her with his spokeshave. Anyway it started before that—everyone a bit nervy for about a fortnight, and then, whammo, something happens and we're all biting each other's head off, even Miss Anty, as I've always gotten on with particularly well. Three, four days of
that
and Deak hanged himself. Hanged himself
because
of it, if you ask me, and this, sir, is a document which many of our American visitors find most intriguing, being the then Sir Spenser Clavering's original letter to William Penn regretting as how a previous engagement made it impossible for Sir Spenser to come and help found Pennsylvania.”

“Goodness me,” said Pibble. How would a London detective behave after a history lesson from such a portentous domestic? He would tip him, with hesitation. Pibble found half a crown and said, “This has been the most interesting, dash it—” (Damn. A bit too much of the Woosters there.) “Thank you very much.”

“Thank
you
very much, sir,” said Mr. Waugh. “I endeavor to give satisfaction.”

He wafted himself silently toward the door, yielding the floor to the watching Mr. Singleton.

“You've got an extraordinary collection here,” said Pibble warmly.

“It's a disgraceful muddle, in my opinion,” said Mr. Singleton. “Our German visitors, and I say this in confidence, are frequently disappointed by the inadequate exhibits on the Raid.”

“Do you get many Germans?”

“An average of seven point two per cent increase in each of the last four years. The future of European tourism is in their hands.”

“Ironic,” said Pibble. “That landing craft Deakin was working on—was that his own idea, or part of some planned expansion?”

“Both, to be candid. Poor Deakin had got it into his head that I was going to build him a special display building for a panorama of the Raid, with himself in charge of it to talk a lot of unsubstantiated gossip about the Claverings at St. Quentin.”

“Strip his sleeve and show his scars,” said Pibble.

“It may seem to you statistically impossible, but only one man was wounded on Uncle Dick's ship, and he was hit while we were waiting to board. We were packed so tightly on deck that it took me a full minute to get a bar of chocolate out of my map pocket, and the sky was stiff with Stukas, but Uncle Dick brought us out. I don't need to tell you that it is not the kind of episode on which it is possible to calculate the odds, but they must be very high indeed.”

“Fantastic,” said Pibble, surprised as much by the sudden liveliness of tone as by the actual story.

“Yes. But we mustn't keep Kirtle waiting—he's a busy man. I expect you would prefer to interview them in private, so I will leave you.”

With the demurest of footfalls they paced the vast hall. Mr. Singleton opened the door of the Zoffany Room but did not go in himself. It was lucky that Sergeant Maxwell was in uniform; otherwise Pibble would have been certain to commit the blunder of acknowledging them in the wrong social order, for it was Dr. Kirtle who had the slabby raw-beef face of the typical village bobby, whereas Maxwell was graying, harassed, wrinkled, humorous, tired—a good but overworked country G.P. to the life. Pibble shook hands with the Doctor and nodded to the Sergeant.

“I'm sorry to bring you out here like this,” he said.

“Not at all, not at all,” said the Doctor, in a strange half-whisper whose obsequiousness seemed to imply that the privilege of breathing the same air as the Claverings excused any inconvenience. Pibble felt stifled with all this insistent grandeur.

“Let's go outside,” he said.

They both flashed him a sharp glance of surprise—in this sort of household one stayed where one was put until one was given permission to move. For a second Maxwell weighed the imponderables of two unlike disciplines, and then (no doubt in the comfortable knowledge that there was a senior officer to take the responsibility) made a vague half shuffle toward the door. The Doctor sensed himself outvoted, whispered “Oh, well,” and moved in the same direction. Pibble led them out to the lawn where he had first seen Mr. Waugh sitting.

“Any bothers, Doctor?” he said. “Hanged himself all right, in your opinion?”

“Dear me, yes,” said the Doctor, in his peculiar breathy whisper. Pibble now saw, in the full light of a sweet October noon, that his neck was puckered with the aftermath of a hideous wound. The flicker of shock in Pibble's eyes must have been very marked, or the Doctor peculiarly sensitive.

“I was on the Raid, too, you know,” he breathed. “I bought it on the quay, just as we were getting ready for the final embarkation. Harvey Singleton carried me onto the boat and the General nursed me home, pumped me full of morphine, knew just what to do—astonishing man. But, yes, old Deak hanged himself, and I can't think why. I hear he was a bit too keen on the ladies, and it might have been something to do with that. He managed it very efficiently, too—clean break, dead in a second.”

“No peculiar bruises, marks of that kind?”

The Doctor ceased pacing the bungey lawn and turned a chill eye on him.

“Great Scott, no!” he said. “You'll be asking me about stomach contents next.”

“If you don't mind,” said Pibble.

“I mind very much indeed,” said the Doctor slowly. “What sort of people do you think you're dealing with? The Claverings aren't here to provide you with your tuppeny-ha'penny sensation which you can peddle to your pals in Fleet Street. They're, they're … Old England!”

“Yes” said Pibble, “that's just why. Suppose the question came up at the inquest. Unlikely, but just suppose. Isn't it better for us to be able to say we looked, and there was nothing suspicious, than to say we wouldn't dream of doing so? I'd prefer to go the whole hog and see that the question
was
asked. I'd make it clear that the investigation had throughout been thorough, normally thorough. Anyway, I'm afraid I must insist on a proper analysis. Let me tell you, Dr. Kirtle, that there's far more nasty publicity in doubts and mysteries than there is in certainties.”

“All right, all right,” whispered the Doctor curtly. “You know more about this sort of thing than I do, I suppose. We're damned suspicious down here, you'll find. They'll have to do the job in Southampton, of course, but I'll lay it on. Anything else?”

“Well, it's a tiny point, but I'm bothered about Mr. Singleton trying to give him the kiss of life. He looked so very dead, and I'd have thought Mr. Singleton could have seen at a glance it was hopeless. You know him better than I do, but he doesn't seem to me the kind of man to make a mistake like that.”

Winter glazed the Doctor's eye again.

“Harvey Singleton,” he said, “had a good war. A very good war indeed. After the Raid he was parachuted into France three times. He was brave, clever, and a brilliant shot. No doubt he saw a lot of dead men, knifed, shot, blown up, garroted. But I doubt if he ever saw a man who'd had his neck broken by dropping three feet with a noose round his throat.”

“No doubt you're right,” said Pibble, stiff with the knowledge that his name was now chiseled deep into the Doctor's opinion as that of a complete tick. The Doctor's boneheaded reverence for great names comforted him not at all. “It's only that I'm paid to think of all the questions which anybody
might
ask.”

“Well, let me tell you another thing. When Lady Clavering died, Herryngs near as a toucher went to pieces. I won't go into the details. But it was Harvey Singleton who held it together, put the Claverings back on their feet. He gave up a very promising job with a merchant bank in the City to come and do it, and he owed them nothing, nothing. He wasn't even married to Anty then. This place is
his
monument, almost as much as it is any of the Claverings'. Remember that.”

“Thank you, Doctor. I will.”

Pibble turned to Sergeant Maxwell, who had dropped a tactful few paces behind as they'd walked along the broad belt of sward between the wall of the house and the drive; they'd come now, in fact, right around the Private Wing to its south face. The Adam-the-Gardener figure, whom he'd last seen spraying the plants in the far colonnade, was now sweeping the edge of the turf with slow, thoughtful strokes where the General's E-Type had sprayed gravel onto the grass.

Sergeant Maxwell dithered unhappily forward to where Pibble waited. A nasty dilemma for a cap-touching local bobby, whether to side with the high-powered officer, who'd be gone back to London tomorrow, or with the Doctor, who had moved off asthmatic with contempt and anger and who would still be about, week after week, year after year, a witness of how Maxwell had borne himself in the hour of trial. Pibble tried to make things as easy as he could for the poor man.