Ancestral Vices

by Tom Sharpe

  *

  Twenty miles away Willy’s body slid over an old weir, swirled in the foam for a few minutes, bumped its way through some rocks and swept on. It was coming back to Buscott, but it never arrived by water. Some small boys playing in the shallows by the Beavery Bridge spotted it and ran along the bank in awful excitement; when Willy was thrust by the current against the trunk of a fallen tree they were there to drag him by his little feet into the side of the river. For a few minutes they stood in frightened silence before scrambling up the bank to the road and stopping the first car. Half an hour later several policemen had arrived and were staring down at the body and the CID in Briskerton had been informed that the body of a presumably murdered dwarf, unofficially identified as William Coppett, had been discovered in the Bus.

  18

  ‘You mean to tell me that Professor Yapp left the house this morning without telling you, and that you found this letter and the cheque waiting for you when you came home from shopping?’

  Rosie stood in the drawing-room of the New House and mumbled, ‘Yes, mum.’

  ‘And don’t call me mum, girl,’ said Emmelia. ‘I’ve had enough of that from Annie over the years. I am not your mum.’

  ‘No, mum.’

  Emmelia gave up. She had had a trying day and had been busily and uncharacteristically using the telephone to the leading members of the family to inform them that a family council was called for, and she had heard too many objections of one sort or another to be in a good mood.

  ‘Did he say where he was going?’

  Rosie shook her head.

  ‘Did he say anything about the Mill?’

  ‘Oh yes, mum, he was always going on about it.’

  ‘What sort of things did he say?’

  ‘What the pay was like and what they made there and such-like.’

  Emmelia considered this unpleasant confirmation of what she already knew and was more than ever convinced that a family consultation was needed.

  ‘And did you tell him?’

  ‘No, mum.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know, mum. Nobody ever told me.’

  Emmelia thanked God and ignored the reiterated implication that she was Rosie Coppett’s mother. The girl was quite evidently stupid and to that extent it was exceedingly fortunate that Yapp had chosen so uninformed a landlady. If that was all he had chosen; the cheque and the note signed ‘Yours most affectionately, Walden’ suggested a less abstemious and, to Emmelia’s way of thinking, a positively perverse relationship. And what on earth did he mean when he said he would get in touch with this mentally deficient creature ‘as soon as it was proper to do so’? She put the question to Rosie, but all she could say was that the Professor was a proper gentleman. Having seen Yapp for herself Emmelia had reservations on that score, but she kept them to herself.

  ‘Well I must say it all sounds most peculiar to me,’ she said finally. ‘However, since he’s given you this money I see no reason why you shouldn’t keep it.’

  ‘Yes, mum,’ said Rosie, ‘but what about Willy?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘His going off like that.’

  ‘Has he never done it before?’

  ‘Oh no, mum, never, not in all the years we’ve been married. Comes home for his supper ever so regular and if it’s not ready he gets so cross and I . . .’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Emmelia, who had more important things to think about than the domestic habits of a dwarf and his overweight wife. ‘In that case you had better go to the police and report him as missing. I can’t imagine why you haven’t done so already.’

  Rosie twisted her fingers together. ‘I didn’t like to, mum. Willy gets ever so fierce if I do things on my own without telling him.’

  ‘I can hardly see how he can possibly object if he’s not there for you to tell,’ said Emmelia. ‘Now then, be off with you and go straight to the police station.’

  ‘Yes, mum,’ said Rosie and followed Annie back to the kitchen obediently.

  Seated at her bureau, Emmelia tried to put this distressing interview to the back of her mind. She had the arrangements for the family council to make and she had yet to decide where to hold it. The Judge, the Brigadier-General and her Dutch cousins, the Van der Fleet-Petrefacts, had all stated their preference for London while Osbert, who owned most of the Petrefact holdings in Buscott and much of the countryside around, combined her own love of obscurity with a fear amounting to a phobia about being denounced as an absentee landlord if he so much as set foot outside the district. But there was a more telling reason in Emmelia’s mind for holding the meeting in Buscott. It would save her the embarrassment of having to explain in detail the exact nature of the objects being made at the Mill. They would be able to see for themselves how imperative it was that the renegade Ronald must be forced to stop Yapp’s researches before the name Petrefact became indissolubly connected in the public mind with dildos, merkins, handmade Male Chastity Belts and French Ticklers. One glimpse inside the Mill would prepare the Judge to commit murder without a second thought, while the Brigadier-General’s obsession with Seal-Pointed gerbils would dwindle in an instant. No, the meeting must be held here in the family house in Buscott. She would put her foot down. And what was more she would insist that the meeting be held the coming weekend. That way no one could object. Even the Judge didn’t try people on Saturdays and Sundays.

  *

  In the reassuringly aseptic surroundings of his rooms at Kloone University Walden Yapp undressed and took a bath with Dettol in it. He had had a horrid journey back from Buscott, had tramped two miles to get a can of petrol from a garage and had had to endure several disconcerting remarks about smells, first of his clothes and then of the old Vauxhall, by the man who had driven him back to the car. Yapp had tried to explain them away by saying he had recently visited an activated sludge dump but the garage man had said it reminded him of something in the war and after several minutes’ silence had gone on rather too appositely about the whiff of dead bodies in Monte Cassino where he’d fought. But at least he had provided enough petrol to get Yapp back to the garage to fill up and then drive back to Kloone without interruption.

  Now in his antiseptic bath he considered his next actions. He would certainly have to do something about his clothes before the cleaning lady came in the morning, and just as certainly he had to clean out the boot of the old Vauxhall. But there were more abstract considerations to deal with and when he had dried himself, put on clean clothes, put the Willy-polluted ones in a plastic dustbin bag and sealed the top, his mind turned to food and Doris. He made himself a bowl of muesli as being both vegetarian and nourishing, sat down at the computer terminal and dialled in.

  On the screen in front of him the comforting figures appeared in that private language he had so carefully devised for his communications with Doris. He was back in his singular world and could at last confide in a brain whose thinking matched his own. There were things he had to tell it – in fact now that he was no longer under the pressure of desperate action it occurred to him that perhaps Doris could help. Munching his muesli he contemplated the screen and made a decision. A full confession of his activities in Buscott, the times and dates on which he had done things, or on which things had happened to him, would definitely clarify his mind while at the same time providing Doris with that data from which she could, as a wholly unbiased observer, draw equally unprejudiced conclusions.

  As night fell outside his white-walled rooms Yapp committed to the computer his most intimate thoughts and feelings about the late Willy Coppett and Rosie, their actions and his own, such minutiae as what the ladies in the teashop had said to him when he was looking for lodgings and the remarks Mr Parmiter had made about tax-dodging and the advantages of buying the Bedford. The hours passed, midnight came and went, and still Yapp sat on in mental communion with his micro-processed alter ego and with each finger-tap on the keyboard and its instantaneous transmission of a digit of recalled expe
rience to the electronic labyrinth, the dangers and chaos of reality receded, were broken down into the simplest units of positive or negative electrical impulse and reassembled in a numerative complexity that took as little cognizance of the true nature of the world as Yapp had programmed it to. Only on one question were they at variance. When, at five in the morning, an exhausted Yapp turned from feeding data to its interpretation and, out of weary impulse, asked ‘Who murdered Willy?’ Doris answered without hesitation, ‘Someone.’ Yapp gaped at the answer groggily.

  ‘I know that,’ he typed, ‘but who had a motive?’

  ‘Rosie’ read Doris. Yapp shook his head and typed furiously.

  ‘Who had the means?’

  Again the name ‘Rosie’ appeared on the screen. Yapp’s fingers danced lividly on the keyboard.

  ‘Why would she do that?’ he demanded.

  ‘In love with you.’ The words seemed to waver in front of him.

  ‘You’re just jealous,’ he said, but the words remained unaltered on the screen. Yapp switched them off, stood up and walked unsteadily to the bed and slumped on it in his clothes.

  *

  In a room in the police station at Buscott Rosie Coppett sat on a chair and wept. She had done as Miss Petrefact had told her and had reported to the constable at the duty desk that Willy was missing, only to learn that he had been found. For a moment she had been happy, but only for a moment.

  ‘Dead,’ said the constable with the brutal stupidity of a young man who thought that because everyone knew Rosie Coppett was simple-minded she was without any feelings as well. Precisely the opposite was true. Rosie had an abundance of feelings and no way of expressing them except by crying, but it had taken some seconds for the smile that had gathered on her face to disintegrate and by that time the constable had fetched the Sergeant.

  ‘There, there,’ said the Sergeant putting a hand on her shoulder, ‘I’m sorry.’

  It was the last kindly word anyone spoke to Rosie that day and she didn’t hear it. From that moment on she had been asked to think. A detective inspector from Briskerton had arrived and had swept the Sergeant aside. Rosie had been taken into a room as bare of ornaments as her little rooms in Rabbitry Road were full of them, and she had been asked questions she had no way of answering except to cry and say she didn’t know. Did Willy have any enemies? Rosie said he didn’t. But someone has killed him, Mrs Coppett, so that can’t be true, can it? Rosie didn’t know Willy had been killed. Murdered, Mrs Coppett, murdered. The word hardly made any impression on Rosie. Willy was dead. She would never have to cook his tea for him again or have him be cross with her for letting Blondie get among the cabbages. They would never go for walks again on Sunday afternoons. She would never be able to buy him cards of bunnies from the newspaper shop on the corner. Never, never, never.

  This certainty came and went and came again with more force each time and the questions she was being asked had nothing to do with that terrible realization. She answered them almost unconsciously. She could not remember when she had last seen him. Was it Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday, Mrs Coppett? But time was as irrelevant as the manner of Willy’s dying and her simple mind was grappling with the prospect of an endless time without Willy.

  Across the table Inspector Garnet watched her closely and tried to decide if he was dealing with a stupid but innocent woman, a stupid and guilty one, or a woman whose stupidity was ravelled with cunning and who, behind the façade of mindless grief, knew almost by instinct how to hide her guilt. A long career as a detective and a short course in criminology had influenced him to think that all criminals, and particularly domestic murderers, were stupid, emotionally unstable and at least partially clever. They had to be stupid to think that they could break the law and get away with it; they had to be emotionally unstable to commit acts of appalling violence; and they had to be in part clever because the rate of unsolved crime continued to rise in spite of brilliant detection by the police.

  Having examined Willy’s terrible injuries the Inspector was in no doubt that he was dealing with a crime of passion. Buscott had nothing to interest gangsters or organized crime while the forensic expert’s preliminary report had ruled out the possibility that Willy had been interfered with sexually. No, all the evidence pointed to an ordinary, if nasty, domestic murder. And Mrs Coppett was a very strong woman while her late husband had been a very small man. Nor did the Inspector have to look far for motive. The dead man’s dwarfishness constituted one motive, his acknowledged bad temper another. Finally there was the fact that Mrs Coppett had only bothered to report that her husband was missing when he had already been found. That suggested some sort of cunning on her part, and her refusal to answer his questions straightforwardly confirmed it. He was particularly bothered by her inability to say when the dead man had last left home, if he ever had before his death.

  So while the Inspector continued his fruitless questioning into the night, other detectives visited Number 9 Rabbitry Road where they took note of Rosie’s predilection for all-in wrestlers and men with all the physical characteristics her late husband so evidently lacked, removed Yapp’s shirt from the clothes line and studied the stain, made more notes about Willy’s cot and Yapp’s unmade bed in the spare room, and were volubly assisted by the neighbours in arriving at totally false conclusions.

  Armed with this new evidence they returned to the police station and conferred with the Inspector.

  ‘Some professor bloke’s been staying there?’ he asked. ‘What the hell for?’

  ‘That’s the puzzle. None of the neighbours knew but a couple of them stated definitely that they had seen Mrs Coppett and the fellow hugging and kissing on the landing on Tuesday night. And the old girl next door and her husband say the Coppetts were always rowing. They had a particularly nasty set-to last week just after the Professor arrived.’

  ‘Did they? Where’s this professor now? And what’s his name?’

  ‘Left this morning. Mrs Mane, she’s the old biddy next door, claims she saw him leave shortly after Mrs Coppett went shopping. Driving a Vauxhall, registration number CFE 9306 D. His name’s Yapp.’

  ‘Useful,’ said the Inspector and went back to Rosie while the stained shirt was sent to the forensic experts for tests.

  ‘Now then I want to hear about this man who calls himself Professor Yapp,’ he told Rosie. ‘What sort of relationship have you been having with him?’

  But Rosie’s thoughts were still fixed on the nothing that would be her life now that Willy had gone from it and she didn’t know what a relationship was. The Inspector spelt it out for her in words of one syllable. Rosie said he’d been kind to her, ever so kind. The Inspector could well believe it, but his sarcasm was wasted on her and she relapsed into a dull silence numbed by her sense of loss. Even when, in a desperate attempt to shock her out of her inability to answer his questions in accordance with accepted police procedure, the Inspector had her taken to identify Willy’s body, she was not to be broken from her grief.

  ‘That’s not my Willy,’ she said through her tears. ‘That’s not anybody.’

  ‘She’s in a state of shock, poor thing,’ said the Sergeant. ‘She may be as thick as two planks but she’s got feelings like the rest of us.’

  ‘She’ll be a poorer thing by the time I’m through with her,’ said the Inspector, but he wanted to sleep too so Rosie was given some blankets and put in a cell with a mug of cocoa.

  Outside in the interrogation room a detective went through her bag and found the cheque and the letter from Yapp.

  ‘That just about wraps it up,’ Inspector Garnet told the Sergeant. ‘We’ll get his address from the bank in the morning and pull him in for questioning – or do you object to putting the pressure on him too?’

  ‘You can do what you like with the sod. All I’m telling you is that Rosie Coppett couldn’t murder anyone, let alone Willy. She’s too soft-hearted and simple. And anyway they were a devoted couple. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘N
ot the neighbours. They know something else again.’

  ‘What neighbours don’t?’ said the Sergeant and went back to his desk wishing to hell the CID from Briskerton hadn’t been called in. There were other things he wouldn’t have minded them investigating in Buscott, but Rosie Coppett as a murderess wasn’t one of them.

  *

  In his farm at the bottom of a muddy lane a mile from Rabbitry Road Mr Jipson slept almost as peacefully as Willy. It had been a week since he had put the body in the boot of the old Vauxhall and during that week Mr Jipson had coped with his conscience. He’d examined the front of his tractor for any sign of lost paint, and hadn’t found any; he had hosed it down and for good measure driven it into the duck-pond beside the farmhouse and then used it to clean out the calf byre so that it was well and truly covered in dung. Best of all, his wife was in hospital having her innards out (as he described a hysterectomy) and wasn’t around to watch him or ask him awkward questions. She might have noticed some change in him. But Mr Jipson was his old self again. The killing of Willy was an accident and could have happened to anyone. It wasn’t his fault that the bloody dwarf had chosen his tractor to walk into and Mr Jipson couldn’t see why he should be penalized by an accident. He worked hard and made a decent living and there was no point in giving it up by telling the world. It had just . . . happened. And anyway the people in that old Vauxhall must have had something to hide or they wouldn’t have hidden Willy Coppett so thoroughly. This last had been the most convincing argument as far as Mr Jipson’s slight conscience was concerned. Nobody who wasn’t guilty of something else would have driven a car around in hot weather with a dead dwarf in the boot and not reported it – and what had they been doing on the night of the accident? They hadn’t been in the car and they couldn’t have been anywhere nearby or they’d have seen him put the body in and raised Cain. Mr Jipson had considered the land where the car had been parked and had thought about the coppice. That was part of Mr Osbert Petrefact’s estate and he’d been having trouble with poachers, hadn’t he? And poaching was a crime, which was more than could be said for road accidents, and therefore the poachers deserved what they had got more than he did.