by Tom Sharpe
‘Must be hard work,’ he said, ‘being a gardener and having all this to look after.’
‘It is.’ This time the voice came from a Tree Peony and sounded even brusquer than before. Yapp noted the tone and put it down to the natural resentment of the menially employed.
‘Have you worked here long?’
‘Just about all my working life.’
Yapp contemplated a working life spent grubbing on hands and knees in dense shrubberies and found it disagreeable. ‘Is the pay good?’ he asked with an inflexion that implied the opposite. Muffled tones from an Osmarea said it didn’t amount to a living wage.
Yapp warmed to the topic. ‘And I don’t suppose the old girl gives you an allowance for travelling time, clothing or tea breaks?’
‘Never heard of them.’
‘Disgraceful,’ said Yapp, happy to have found someone in Buscott with a genuinely proletarian sense of grievance. ‘What you need is a Horticultural Workers’ Union to fight for your rights. I mean, how many hours a week do you have to work to maintain this garden in the state the old woman demands?’
A further series of belligerent snorts ended with ‘Ninety.’
Yapp was appalled. ‘Ninety? That’s outrageous.’
‘Sometimes a hundred,’ said the voice, moving on to a Sorbaria.
‘But . . . but that’s sweated labour,’ said Yapp, struggling to find words for his fury. ‘The old bitch has absolutely no right to treat you like that. Nobody in industry would dream of working a hundred hours a week. And of course you don’t get paid overtime, do you?’
A derisive chuckle in the depths of the Sorbaria answered his question. Yapp followed the voice down the shrubbery fulminating against the evils of exploitation. ‘And I daresay it’s the same down in that foul Mill of theirs. The whole system is rotten to the core. Well, I’m going to see that this town and what the Petrefacts are doing here hits the headlines. It’s a perfect example of the vices and lengths the capitalist class will go to to screw the proletariat. You can tell the filthy old bitch that I can do without her help, thank you very much, and she’s going to learn what some well-organized publicity can do to change things.’
And having worked himself up into a state of righteous indignation at the plight of the workers of Buscott on the strength of this single and rather one-sided interview, Yapp strode back to the car, got in and drove away. He knew now what he was going to do; return to Kloone and set in motion the research team he had organized. There were to be no more preliminary studies on an individual basis. People were too intimidated to talk openly unless, like the old gardener, they were assured of anonymity or knew that the outside world was there to protect them. Well, the outside world would be there in force with tape-recorders and cameras.
*
Behind him the filthy old bitch emerged from a Mock Orange and stared after him with mixed feelings. The man was a blithering idiot but also a dangerous one and she was glad she had had the chance to see him in his true colours instead of more politely over afternoon tea. And she was certainly extremely pleased that she had remained as obscure as her forebears. Wiping her hands on her apron, Emmelia went into the house with new determination. Professor Walden Yapp had to be stopped from continuing his researches any further. He had already gone too far.
17
In fact Yapp had gone some thirty-eight miles at a far higher speed than was his norm when his sense of moral outrage at the plight of the workers of Buscott was joined and largely overwhelmed by his sense of smell. By the time he had to stop at a crossroads because of the traffic he was in two minds whether to go on or take the car back to Mr Parmiter and complain that there was something fundamentally wrong with the thing. But having come so far, and remembering the garage proprietor’s unpleasantness, he went on. Perhaps the awful stench would disappear. It certainly lessened when he drove fast with all the windows open and the de-mister on, but every time he slowed down it seemed to catch up with him again. And it was a particularly nauseous smell. Yapp couldn’t put a name to it, but the notion that it had anything to do with pig-manure was definitely out of the question. Nothing he had ever experienced smelt like this, and coming so shortly after his bout of flu, it was playing havoc with his stomach. In desperation he pulled into the side of the road, got out of the car and took several deep breaths of fresh air.
Feeling slightly better, he poked his head through the car window and sniffed. The ghastly odour was still there, and now that he could compare it with unpolluted air it smelt worse than ever. Whatever was making it had something to do with the car and for the first time Yapp began to think it might have something to do with death. Perhaps he had run over a rabbit which had got caught up in the fan belt? He opened the bonnet and looked inside, but there was no sign of dead rabbits and the air in the engine compartment smelt decidedly better than that in the interior. Yapp went round to the back door and sniffed again. The fetor was positively foul there, but though he looked on the floor and felt under the seats he could find nothing to explain it. There remained the boot. Yapp climbed out again and, after taking several more deep breaths, undid the latch and opened it. A moment later he was staggering back, had caught his foot in the handle of an abandoned pram, and was lying on his back staring insanely at the sky. It was no longer a cloudless sky, the weather had changed for the worse, but at least it was infinitely better to look at than what lay in the boot. Anything was. The sky had a sanity about it, a sense of the natural and the real that was entirely lacking in a putrefying dwarf.
For several minutes Yapp lay there trying to imagine the sight away. But his imagination failed him and in the end, with the terrible feeling that he had gone mad and was hallucinating, he got to his feet, detached his torn trouser-leg from the rusty pram, and took another look. This time there could be no doubting the reality of the contents of the boot nor its identity. Distinctly dented and in a post-mortem foetal position, the late Willy Coppett could hardly be mistaken for anyone else, not even by Yapp who would have cheerfully exchanged him for the first symptom of lunacy. Insanity could, with the help of modern medicine, be cured but dead dwarves were beyond any form of aid. Yapp shut the boot hurriedly and stared wildly into the coppice beside the lay-by in a frantic attempt to think. It wasn’t easy. The presence of a corpse, and a mangled one at that, in the boot of the car he had been driving didn’t make for coherent thought. How had Willy Coppett got there? From his two brief glimpses Yapp had no doubt that he hadn’t got in of his own accord. Someone had put him there and, what was even worse, someone had evidently murdered him too. Dwarves, no matter how alienated by the awful nature of their employment, didn’t bash themselves over the head with blunt instruments and then crawl into the boots of other people’s cars and die. Yapp felt sure about that, just as he felt sure that Willy’s death had been brought about by the forceful use of a blunt instrument. In the past he had speculated about the use of the word ‘blunt’ and had found it imprecise, but two glances at Willy’s corpse had been enough to persuade him that the term was exact. In any case he had no time for such speculations now. He had to do something.
It was here that he hit another snag. Like ‘blunt’ the word ‘do’ meant, in these appalling circumstances, something quite different from what he had previously supposed. It didn’t mean uttering opinions, giving lectures or even writing learned monographs. It meant getting back into that noisome vehicle, driving it to the nearest police station and explaining to a constable or sergeant that he was in possession, albeit unintentionally, of one dead, decaying and distinctly murdered dwarf. Yapp visualized the consequences of this admission and found them all exceedingly unpleasant. In the first place there would be very considerable doubts as to his story, secondly about his sanity and finally, if his experience of the police was anything to go by, no doubts whatsoever about his guilt. Now that he came to think of it, it was inconceivable that anyone with a remotely acute sense of smell could have driven that stinking car nearly forty miles witho
ut being aware that there was something long-dead in it. There would be no explaining to an ignorant rural constable that he had been so outraged by social conditions in Buscott that he had had no nose for more immediate corruption, nor that for the most part he had driven so fast as to leave smells behind. And stories about dead rabbits wouldn’t do either. Whatever dead rabbits smelt like, and Yapp had no idea, he was certain they couldn’t come within a mile of smelling as noxiously as dead Persons of Restricted Growth. And to add to his problems in dealing with the police, he had on numerous occasions addressed rallies of militant strikers and flying pickets, not to mention protest meetings on behalf of falsely charged criminals or persecuted minority groups, at which he had megaphonically denounced the police as a semi-paramilitary force dedicated to the protection of property at the expense of people and as, in one widely reported speech, ‘the fuzz on the face of fascism’. In the light of his present predicament, Yapp regretted these pronouncements. They were hardly likely to gain him a sympathetic hearing in any police station. Stories of brutality in the cells circulated in his memory and to add to his panic it occurred to him that whoever had murdered Willy had chosen his temporary resting place with a degree of acumen that suggested the choice was not purely fortuitous. In short, he had been framed. Paranoia joined panic. He had definitely been framed and the reason wasn’t too hard to find. He had been framed to prevent his exposure of the deplorable conditions that without a shadow of doubt existed in the Petrefact Mill. It was a typical act of political terrorism on the part of the capitalist establishment.
From that realization Yapp drew a simple conclusion. He must get rid of the body as speedily as possible and in such a way that he couldn’t be connected with it. What was more, he would send it back where it properly belonged. But how? He certainly wasn’t going to drive back with it to Buscott, but didn’t the River Bus flow somewhere nearby? Yapp hurriedly consulted his map and found the river several miles to the east. If he drove on he would come to a side road that crossed it, and where roads crossed rivers they did so on bridges.
Yapp got back into the Vauxhall, thanked God there had been no passing traffic to see him parked in the lay-by, prayed fervently that the recent rains had turned the Bus into a deep torrent, and drove off. Twenty minutes later he had reached the bridge and as he passed across it was grateful to note that the river had not dwindled to a stream but was broad and apparently deep. Best of all, the side road lived up to its name. He had met no other cars and he could see no houses in the vicinity. On either side of the Bus woods sloped up to the empty moors whose depopulation he had so incorrectly diagnosed when he had crossed them on the day of his arrival. Now he was thankful for their emptiness but to make quite sure he wouldn’t be observed he drove on up the hill on the far side of the bridge and surveyed the bleak landscape. There was not a farm in sight. He turned the car round and went back to the bridge and parked in a little clearing under the trees where empty cigarette packets, squashed cans of beer and cartons indicated people came for picnics.
Yapp got out and listened, but apart from the slop of the river and the occasional birdsong there was silence. No one about. Good. The next five minutes were not. The late Willy Coppett not only stank to high heaven but he also showed a marked disinclination to leave the boot. His little shoes caught under one side while he adhered to the floor in several places so that Yapp had to grapple with him rather more closely than his stomach enjoyed. Twice he had to give up the struggle to retch into the bracken and when he finally managed to drag the body from the boot he was horrified to discover that Willy had died not solely from injuries caused by a blunt instrument but also by the insertion of an extremely sharp one. This was brought home to him when the point of the knife protruding from Willy’s back jabbed Yapp in the stomach so painfully that instead of carrying the corpse onto the bridge before dropping it into the river he let go of it on land and watched with horror as it rolled slowly down the bank into the water.
Even then Yapp’s panic was not abated. His lack of experience in disposing of dead bodies in rivers had led him to suppose that they sank. The late Willy Coppett didn’t. He drifted slowly away downstream, snagged his jacket for several seconds in an overhanging bush, was twirled round by the current, collided with a log and finally disappeared round a bend.
Yapp didn’t wait. Thankful that he was no longer the driver of an obviously illegal hearse, he got back into the driving seat of the old Vauxhall and drove back the way he had come with the slightly comforting thought that in two hours he would be in his rooms at Kloone and could have a bath. But as ever with his theories, reality proved this one wrong. An hour later two miles out of Wastely the Vauxhall came to a halt and the engine stopped. Yapp tried the starter twice without success and then noticed that the petrol gauge read empty.
‘Shit,’ said Yapp with uncharacteristic violence and got out.
*
At Number 9 Rabbitry Road Rosie Coppett had returned from her shopping expedition in that same state of mental uncertainty in which she lived her life unless there was someone around to make up what there was of her mind for her. Since Willy’s mysterious departure she had relied on Yapp, and had gone on with her daily routine telling herself that the Professor would know what to do about finding Willy as soon as he got better. But the letter on the hall table, the cheque for three hundred pounds and, worst of all, his empty room finally convinced her that he too had deserted her. Rosie took the cheque and the letter into the kitchen and looked at them both with pathetic bewilderment. The enormous sum of money he seemed to be giving her didn’t make sense to her. After all, he had refused her offer of extras and she hadn’t done anything more for him than she would have done for any other lodger and here was three hundred pounds. What for? And why did he write that he would get in touch with her as soon as it was proper to do so and sign his letter ‘Yours most affectionately, Walden’? Slowly but with dim determination she grappled with the pieces of this puzzle. The Professor had come to stay and had paid more than she asked; he had refused her extras but had said he liked her and had comforted her by holding her hand and she had known that he meant it; Willy had disappeared without a word of warning two days later; and now the Professor, who had been so ill, had gone too, leaving her all this money. He had also left the letter from Miss Petrefact unopened and finally the shirt she had so thoroughly washed in a vain attempt to get the bloodstain off it was still hanging on the clothes line where she had hoped the sunshine would bleach the stain away. She was alone with Blondie and Hector and they couldn’t tell her what to do.
She got up from the kitchen table and made a pot of strong tea like her mum had told her to when anything nasty had happened. After that she ate several slices of bread and dripping, all the while wondering where to turn to for advice. The neighbours wouldn’t do. Willy would be ever so cross if she went to them and told them he’d gone away, and the Marriage lady wasn’t any good either. She’d told her to leave Willy and now Willy had left her she’d say it served her right and it didn’t. She’d always been a good wife to him and nobody could say she hadn’t and it wasn’t right to tell wives to leave their hubbies. Which brought her to the Vicar, but he was all hoity-toity and didn’t stop to chat to her when she left church like he did with other richer ladies, and besides, he’d made them say they would never leave one another and, now that Willy had, he’d be angry and wouldn’t let Willy sing in the choir like he used to. There was really no one she knew she could go to.
In the end she remembered Miss Petrefact’s letter which the Professor had never opened. She wouldn’t like Miss Petrefact to think she hadn’t given it to him. She’d better return it. And so, drawn all unknowingly by the custom of deference to the Petrefacts, she put all the bits of paper and the envelope in her bag, left the house, passed sadly through Willy’s collection of garden gnomes whose rigor he now shared, and trudged off in the direction of the New House.
Half an hour later she was seated in the kitchen th
ere telling an interested Annie, who had nothing better to do than string runner beans, all her troubles.
‘He left you a cheque for three hundred pounds? What would he want to do that for?’ said Annie, who had been most interested in the story of the bloodstained shirt on the very night Willy Coppett hadn’t come home. Rosie rummaged in her bag and brought the cheque out.
‘I don’t know. I don’t even know how to put it in the Post Office savings. Willy always does that.’
Annie studied the cheque and the letter that had been in the envelope with it. ‘“Yours most affectionately, Walden,”’ she read out and looked at Rosie Coppett suspiciously. ‘That doesn’t sound like a lodger. That sounds like something else. He didn’t try to get up to anything with you, did he?’
Rosie blushed and then giggled. ‘Not really. Not like you mean. He was ever so nice though. He said he was very fond of me and respected me as a woman.’
Annie looked at her even more doubtfully. She couldn’t remember any man, let alone a professor, telling her that he was very fond of her and as for respecting Rosie Coppett as a woman when the girl was clearly a half-wit, the man who said that must definitely have been up to something not at all nice.
‘I think Miss Emmelia ought to see this,’ she said, and before Rosie could protest that she didn’t want to get Willy or anybody into trouble Annie had gathered the cheque and the note and taken them through to the front of the house. Rosie sat on absentmindedly stringing the rest of the runner beans. She felt very nervous but at the same time she was glad she had come because she didn’t have to think what to do any more. Miss Petrefact would know.