Ancestral Vices

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘Well, which is it to be?’ snapped the Inspector. Yapp tried to adjust his thoughts to his predicament. In between bouts of shivering on the drive down he had decided that his only hope lay in being demonstrably cooperative and in telling the truth. If the police were at all perceptive they would realize that he had absolutely no motive for murdering Willy, that he had influential friends, if not at court, at least in Parliament and the Labour Party, and that it was manifestly absurd to suppose he had homicidal tendencies. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth would demonstrate his innocence.

  ‘If you mean by that question, am I prepared to answer questions and make a full statement, yes I am.’

  The moustache twitched almost amiably. ‘Splendid,’ said the mouth below it, ‘saves everyone a lot of time and trouble. I take it you’ve been properly cautioned and know that you need say nothing. Sergeant, read the prisoner the cautionary rigmarole.’

  The Sergeant read it out while the Inspector regarded Yapp with interest. The man was mad, of course, but it made a change to have an insane professor with a public reputation to cross-examine and, having watched several of Yapp’s televised productions of the horrors of nineteenth century life, the Inspector was looking forward to his interrogation. It would be a sort of Criminal Mastermind competition and a conviction would enhance his promotion prospects.

  ‘Right, now then, let’s get the grisly bit over first,’ he said. ‘At what moment in time did you decide to murder the deceased?’

  Yapp sat up in his chair. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘In the first place I didn’t murder him and in the second your assumption that I did shows a degree of bias that is—’

  ‘Prisoner denies murdering deceased,’ the Inspector told the stenographer. ‘Accuses police of bias.’ He leant across the table and put his moustache uncomfortably close to Yapp’s face. ‘When did you put the murdered man’s body in the boot of your car?’

  ‘Never,’ said Yapp. ‘I found it there.’

  ‘Found it there, did you?’

  ‘Yes. In an advanced state of putrefaction.’

  ‘Extraordinary. Quite extraordinary. You found the putrefying corpse of a murdered dwarf in the boot of your car and you did not bother to bring it to the police. Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Yapp, ‘I know it sounds extraordinary but that’s what happened.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I panicked.’

  ‘Naturally. First thing a highly intelligent, sensitive bloke like you would do, panic. Perfectly understandable reaction. So what did you do after panicking?’

  Yapp looked at the moustache doubtfully. He couldn’t decide if it was understanding or twitching with sarcasm. ‘I drove to the river and dropped it in.’

  ‘And why did you do that?’

  ‘Obviously because I didn’t want to be connected with it. I mean, Willy Coppett had been murdered and someone had tried to put the blame on me by leaving him in the boot of the car and I didn’t want to be accused.’

  ‘Something you’ve got in common with the murderer at any rate,’ said the Inspector. ‘Meaning of course the bloke who put the body in the boot in the first place.’

  ‘Yes,’ admitted Yapp.

  The Inspector reached into a drawer in the desk and produced the bloodstained shirt. ‘I’d like you to have a look at this and tell us what you know about it. Take your time, there’s no hurry.’

  Yapp looked at the shirt. ‘It’s mine.’

  ‘Good. Now then, did you or did you not wear that shirt on the evening of July twenty-first this year?’

  Yapp took his eyes off the moustache and back to the shirt while he consulted his memory. 21st July was the night it had rained and he’d been in the coppice with his Y-fronts and had caught his cold. It was also the night he’d cut his hands on the barbed wire and gone back to Rabbitry Road with blood on his shirt-front and Rosie had insisted on washing it at once.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  This time the Inspector actually smiled momentarily. This was a piece of cake. If all villains were so fucking stupid he’d have an easy life. ‘And did you return to Rabbitry Road with blood all over that shirt?’

  Yapp hesitated again. ‘It wasn’t all over it. Just down the front. I’d cut my hands on some barbed wire and I thought I must have wiped them accidentally on the shirt.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said the Inspector, ‘and I daresay you’d be surprised to learn that the blood on that shirt – fresh blood, mind you – has been proved to have come from the murdered man.’

  Yapp focused on that vile little moustache and found no comfort in it now. ‘Yes, I’d be very surprised. I don’t know how it got there.’

  ‘Could it be that when the murderer put the body of Mr Coppett into the boot of your car he didn’t realize the poor little bugger was still alive and bleeding and the blood got on his shirt that way?’

  Yapp said nothing. The trap was closing on him and he couldn’t begin to understand why.

  ‘Could it, Professor Yapp? Could it?’

  ‘If you’re saying that I put Willy in that boot . . .’

  The Inspector raised a hand. ‘Now we mustn’t put words into one another’s mouths, must we? I didn’t say anything about you putting the murdered man in the boot. I merely asked if, when the murderer put him in, he could have got blood on his shirt front. Now, could he have or couldn’t he?’

  ‘I suppose he could have but—’

  ‘Thank you, that’s all I wanted to know. Now then, let’s return to your panic on finding the body in the boot and dropping it in the river. When did this happen?’

  ‘Yesterday,’ said Yapp, amazed that it had only been the day before that his life had taken such a ghastly turn.

  ‘And what drew your attention to the fact that you were carrying a dead dwarf round the place in your car?’

  ‘The smell,’ said Yapp. ‘It was exceedingly unpleasant. I stopped beside the road to investigate its source.’

  ‘Very sensible of you. Would you mind telling me where you stopped to make this investigation?’

  Again Yapp saw the trap closing but again there was no way of avoiding it. If he said he’d noticed the smell in Buscott and had then driven nearly forty miles before ditching the body in the river . . . No, he had to tell the truth. ‘It was on the road to Wastely. If you’ll get me a map I’ll show you.’

  A map was fetched and he indicated the spot.

  ‘And from there you took it where?’

  ‘To the river here,’ said Yapp, pointing to the side road and the bridge.

  ‘So you drove all that way before you began to wonder what the smell was?’

  ‘I’d wondered what it was before but my mind was preoccupied at the time and I put it down to a farmer manuring his fields.’

  ‘With dead dwarves?’ enquired the Inspector.

  ‘Certainly not. I thought it was pig dung.’

  ‘So for forty miles you thought that farmers were continuously mucking their fields with pig dung? Isn’t that stretching it a bit far?’

  ‘I said I was preoccupied at the time,’ said Yapp.

  The Inspector nodded. ‘I’m not in the least surprised. I mean you’d got something to be preoccupied about, hadn’t you?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I had. I’d just had an interview with Miss Petrefact’s gardener and was outraged to learn that he worked a ninety-hour week, sometimes a hundred, and is paid a pittance. That’s downright sweated labour.’

  ‘Shocking. So you shove the body into the river and head for home. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Yapp.

  ‘What did you do then?’

  ‘Had a bath.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Had something to eat and went to bed,’ said Yapp, rapidly deciding that, since he hadn’t been asked specifically about his dialogue with Doris, there was no need for him to mention it. He was still annoyed with the computer for pointing to Rosie as the person with the most
logical motive for the murder of Willy, and he most certainly had no intention of providing the police with Doris’s conclusions. Poor Rosie must be grief-stricken in any case and to have the police accusing her of murder was unthinkable.

  ‘And this morning you took the car to a car-wash and did your level best to remove all traces of evidence that the boot had been used as a hiding-place for the corpse?’ continued the Inspector.

  ‘I had to. It’s a hire car and I’d only rented it for a month. If I had really murdered Mr Coppett do you think I’d have used a hire car to hide the body for so long? Of course not. It’s not logical.’

  The Inspector nodded. ‘But perhaps you hadn’t intended to leave the body there so long,’ he said. ‘Now let’s get back to the night of the murder. Would you mind giving a full account of your movements that evening?’

  Yapp looked at him miserably. He minded very much but he had decided to tell the truth and there could be no going back on it now.

  ‘You’re assuming that the murder took place on the night of 21 July?’ he said to delay matters.

  ‘I am,’ said the Inspector. ‘That was the last time the murdered man was seen. He left the pub where he worked at eleven o’clock and never arrived home. You, on the other hand, arrived there soaking wet and with his blood on your shirt shortly after midnight. Now if you can explain in detail what you did that evening it might help to solve this case.’

  ‘Well, earlier in the evening Mrs Coppett asked me to take her for a drive.’

  ‘She asked you or you invited her?’

  ‘She asked me,’ said Yapp. ‘As you probably know, the Coppetts don’t own a car because Mr Coppett’s restricted growth made it impossible for him to drive an ordinary model and Mrs Coppett’s educational sub-normality prevented her from taking the test. Anyway, I doubt if they could have afforded one.’

  ‘So you took her for a drive. Where?’

  ‘Here,’ said Yapp, tracing their route on the map.

  ‘What time did this drive take place?’

  ‘Between seven and nine, I think.’

  ‘And what happened after that?’ asked the Inspector, who had already studied the evidence of the neighbours that they had seen Yapp and Mrs Coppett kissing.

  ‘I went for another drive,’ said Yapp miserably.

  ‘You went for another drive,’ repeated the Inspector with an ominous monotony.

  ‘Yes.’

  The Inspector smoothed his little moustache. ‘And would it be true to say that while outside the Coppetts’ house you kissed Mrs Coppett?’

  ‘Sort of,’ said Yapp with misplaced gallantry. The thought of poor Rosie being put through this sort of interrogation was quite unbearable.

  ‘Sort of? You wouldn’t mind being more explicit? Either you kissed her or you didn’t.’

  ‘We kissed. That is true.’

  ‘And you then drove off again. Why?’

  ‘Um . . . er . . .’ said Yapp.

  ‘Yes, well that doesn’t take us any further, does it? So I’ll repeat my question. Why did you drive off again?’

  Yapp looked dolefully around the room but the blank walls seemed to hold out no hope that if he lied now the rest of his story would be believed.

  ‘As a matter of fact I had done something you may think a little peculiar.’

  The Inspector didn’t doubt it. As far as he was concerned the whole bloody business was peculiar, not least an educational system that allowed blithering young maniacs like Yapp to become professors.

  ‘You see,’ continued Yapp, whose Adam’s apple was bobbing with embarrassment, ‘as a result of Mrs Coppett’s close physical contiguity I had had an involuntary emission.’

  ‘You’d had what?’

  ‘An involuntary emission,’ said Yapp squirming on his chair.

  ‘In other words you’d come, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘As a result of her jerking you off?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Yapp stiffly, ‘Mrs Coppett isn’t that sort of a woman. What I said was that as a result of her . . .’

  ‘I heard you,’ said the Inspector. ‘Close physical con-something or other.’

  ‘Contiguity. It means contact, proximity and touching.’

  ‘Does it indeed? And I suppose you’re going to tell me now that jerking off, or if you prefer, masturbation, doesn’t require contact, proximity and touching?’

  ‘I’m not saying anything of the sort. I’m merely saying that her close physical presence next to me in the car had this unfortunate effect on me.’

  The Inspector regarded him beadily. He’d got the sod on the trot now and he wasn’t going to let him stop. ‘Are you seriously trying to tell me that having Mrs Coppett sitting beside you was enough to make you blow your fucking fuse?’

  ‘I object to that expression. It’s coarse, vulgar and quite uncalled for and I—’

  ‘Listen, mate,’ interrupted the Inspector, leaning across the desk and shoving his face close to Yapp’s, ‘you’re not in any position to object to anything short of physical violence and you’d have a hard time proving that, so don’t come any of your student-protest crap at me. This isn’t some drug-ridden intellectual arsehole of a university and you aren’t lecturing anyone, savvy? You’re our Number One suspect in a particularly nasty little murder and I’ve enough evidence already to have you remanded in custody and tried and sentenced and have your appeal rejected. So don’t start telling me what sort of fucking language to use. Just get on and tell us your story.’

  Yapp sat shaken in his chair. Reality at its most horrible was intruding now and there was no mistaking the menace of that little moustache. Yapp went on with his story and told the truth and nothing but the truth, and with its telling all doubts that he might after all have been mistaken about Yapp’s guilt vanished from Inspector Garnet’s mind.

  ‘Sat in a coppice with his Y-fronts in his hand for a couple of hours in the pouring rain and he expects me to believe it,’ he said when Yapp had been formally charged with the murder of the late Mr William Coppett and taken to a cell, ‘and he can’t precisely recall where the coppice was or the gate or even the bleeding road. I like that “precisely”, I do indeed. Well at least he’s let the woman off the hook. Might as well let her out.’

  While Yapp sat in a cell and wondered at the infamy of the Petrefacts, who were so obviously prepared to sacrifice the life of a Porg to protect their precious reputation, Rosie was led out of the police station and told she was free.

  The word meant nothing to her. Without the necessity of having Willy to look after she would never know freedom again.

  21

  Emmelia was unaware of these developments. Already isolated from the gossip of Buscott by her seclusion, she was now preoccupied with the arrangements for the family council. She and Annie bustled in and out of bedrooms, turned mattresses and aired sheets, and all the time she had to remember the quirks of each of the Petrefacts. The Judge had peculiarly large dentures and would require an appropriately large glass beside his bed; the Brigadier-General always insisted on a decanter of malt whisky beside his and a cover for his chamberpot because a prize and surprisingly pregnant gerbil had once drowned itself in one; the Van der Fleet-Petrefacts had had their house burnt down round their heads and refused to sleep in an upstairs bedroom so they’d have to go in the morning-room and, finally and least to her liking, Fiona had cabled unexpectedly from Corfu that she and her unisex spouse were flying over because Leslie simply couldn’t wait to meet all her relatives at once. Emmelia had grave doubts about having them in the house at all. The Judge held such violent views on homosexuality that he had once sentenced an unfortunate burglar whose name was Gay to an exceptionally long term of imprisonment and had had his judgment set aside on appeal. No, it would be best if Fiona and Leslie were as little in evidence as possible. They could stay with Osbert at the Old Hall.

  But while she supervised these arrangements and recruited several respecta
ble women from the Mill to help, Emmelia’s thoughts turned again and again to the despicable Ronald. In a last desperate and restrained letter to him she had invited him to the family gathering and had even gone so far as to state that its purpose was to consider the future of the Mill, which was true, and the possibility of the family agreeing to sell their shares in it, which was not. Lord Petrefact had not replied, but she had hardly expected him to. If he came at all he would come unannounced to enjoy the spectacle of his relatives’ dismay and outrage at the prospect of having the name Petrefact dragged still further from its obscurity and thrust into the limelight as the family which owned a fetish factory. It was just the sort of situation he would most enjoy.

  Emmelia was right. Lord Petrefact had decided to attend. Her letter had whetted his appetite for family rows. There was nothing he enjoyed more, and her intimation that his relatives might be prepared to sell their shares in the Mill suggested nothing of the sort to Lord Petrefact. It suggested that they wanted him down there to bring the full weight of their pressure on him to call a halt to Yapp’s evidently highly disturbing activities in Buscott. Lord Petrefact looked forward to that pressure. He would have to do nothing more than sit still while they raged at him and his silence would be more devastating than words. And if by some extraordinary chance they were prepared to sell the Mill in exchange for an end to Yapp’s research he would make the sanctimonious bunch sweat while he went through the motions of considering their offer, but in the end he would still refuse. Feeling quite tipsy with power he rang for Croxley.

  ‘We’re going down to Buscott immediately. Make arrangements for the journey and accommodation in the neighbourhood.’

  ‘There’s the New House,’ said Croxley. ‘Surely Miss Emmelia will have room?’

  Lord Petrefact fixed him with the less favoured side of his face. ‘I said accommodation, not a rats’ nest of relatives,’ he said with a malevolence that was persuasive. Croxley left the room puzzled. First Yapp in Buscott and now the old devil himself. And what did he mean by a rats’ nest of relatives? To engender some more information from Lord Petrefact Croxley phoned every hotel in the district and demanded two groundfloor suites and a guarantee of absolute silence between 10 p.m. and 9 a.m., provision for room service all night and an undertaking that the chef be on twenty-four-hour duty. Armed with seven indignant refusals he returned to Lord Petrefact’s office.