Three Brothers

by Peter Ackroyd

  The front door was locked but not bolted; Sam hesitated before entering it, nervous of entering the private domain of Asher Ruppta. His first impression of the hallway was one of quiet order; flowers in vases, figurines of marble placed on two cabinets of polished wood, a painting of a bridge over a river. A wide staircase, carpeted in scarlet, led from the hall; Sam looked up at the first landing, and saw it. It was lying there in an unusual position, with the left arm trapped beneath the back.

  This was the body of Asher Ruppta. His throat had been cut, and the scarlet carpet was soaked in his blood. The rictus of sudden death was upon his face, but it gave him the appearance of smiling. At the sight of that smile, Sam became suddenly calm. He looked around for a telephone, and walked into the room nearest to him. This room was bare except for a long table on which various artefacts had been placed—a flute, an intricately carved casket, a figurine with a long face, a perforated stone, a knife carved out of amber. He looked at each in turn.

  When a telephone rang, he walked towards the sound. It was in another room on the opposite side of the hall. He took up the receiver, and heard the voice of someone talking softly in a foreign language. “I cannot talk to you now,” he said, and put down the receiver. Then he called the police.

  They did not question him for long. His story was consistent and truthful, although he did not tell them about the muttered voice on the telephone. The sergeant had taken one look at the gaping wound in Ruppta’s neck. “A sharp knife,” he said. “Very neat. Almost perfect, really. You have to take your hat off.”

  Sam nodded. “There is a knife in the next room.” So they retrieved the amber knife, and placed it carefully in a transparent plastic bag.

  When Sam was allowed to leave, he went down the gravel path and found the crow still perched on the high brick wall. He did not know if it was the same crow but he hoped that it was. The bird put its head to one side, and seemed to be listening intently to something that Sam could not hear.

  When he had been in the presence of Ruppta’s body, he had remained calm and careful; he had not surrendered to panic or alarm. Now that he was outside the house, he felt an overwhelming urge to run and to shout news of the event to anyone he passed. Instead he walked quickly down the road, and then took a bus to London Bridge. He wanted to see his mother as soon as he could. He had to tell someone.

  When he arrived she was sitting in the back garden, leaning forward, looking speculatively at a patch of soil and considering what to plant there. He bent over to kiss her cheek. “Ruppta is dead,” he said.

  She fell back in her chair. “What?”

  “Murdered.”

  “Oh my God.” She put her hand up to her neck.

  “His throat was cut.” She put down her hand. “I found him, Mum. I think he must have been pushed down the stairs first. There was blood all over the place.”

  She stared at him. “Did you say that his throat was cut?”

  “Yes. Right across.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “It’s true.”

  “No. I can believe it. When?”

  “I’ve just come from the house.”

  “From Ruppta’s house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who did it? Sorry. Stupid question.” She bowed her head, and then suddenly she looked up at him with bright eyes. “What about his will?”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “But do you know his lawyer?”

  “Julie will know. She’s worked with him for years.”

  “Good. I must speak to her.”

  “Why should you be interested?”

  “I have known Ruppta for a long time. And I have a special reason.” Sam could see that she was trembling, and that she did not want to look at him.

  “I see.”

  “You don’t see, Sam, but soon you will.”

  On the following day Sam went into the office very early. He had not been able to communicate with Julie Armitage; he did not have her telephone number, and she had never given him her address. It was likely that she did not know about the death of her employer; she never read the newspapers, and rarely listened to the radio.

  She came in at the usual time; her quick step down the corridor was familiar to him, and he stood up before she entered the room. She glanced at him as she put her raincoat on a wooden peg behind the door. “What’s up with you, Samuel? You’re not normally so polite. It makes me feel very ladylike. Very feminine.” She was wearing a dress that looked like a dustman’s sack. “Tea for two at Claridge’s?”

  “Ruppta is dead.”

  She looked at him almost without expression. “I don’t believe you just said that.”

  “He was murdered.”

  She sat down or, rather, she fell into a chair and put her head in her hands. She remained in that posture for a minute or so, completely still. “Well,” she said eventually. “I always knew he would have a bad end. Ruppy’s finally had it, has he? My word. Gordon Bennett.”

  “The police will want to talk to you, Julie.”

  “And I will want to talk to them. He had a lot of enemies, Ruppy did. They could have been queuing up to shoot him.”

  “He wasn’t shot. His throat was cut.”

  “That’s Ruppy for you. Always goes to extremes.” She listened eagerly as Sam went through the story again and again; she kept on asking him to repeat certain details, or remind her of what he had said before. “What colour was his blood?” she asked him.

  “Well, red of course.”

  “You never know.”

  He was just about to elaborate upon his description of the amber knife when his mother walked in. He was surprised to see her.

  Julie looked up at her, puzzled. “Can I help you?”

  “Good morning, Sam. Yes. I think you can help me, Julie.”

  “How do you—?”

  “My son told me. Sam told me …”

  “I didn’t know he had a mother.”

  Sally laughed. “You may know me better as Sally Palliser.”

  Julie was astonished. “What? Are you here?” She rose to her feet, and then abruptly sat down again. “I never expected to see you in all my life.”

  “And I never expected to be here with you. And Sam. Life has a way of tricking us, doesn’t it?”

  Sam looked at both of them with curiosity. “Do you want me to wait outside?” He was very demure.

  “Not at all,” his mother replied. “You have to know this. Asher Ruppta took me in when I was in trouble. We had a child together. A boy. You never knew about this, Julie.”

  “I thought there was something,” Julie said. “He used to be driven down to this school. He said he was on the board of governors.”

  “He is. Well, was. I’m going down there today. To pick up Andrew.” She glanced at Sam. “That is why we must find the will, Julie. I want to make sure that Andrew is protected.”

  Sam sensed the presence of something shuddering in the room, coming not from any one of them but from the three of them in combination.

  “If there is a will,” Julie was saying, “then George Flom will have it.”

  “His lawyer?”

  “His so-called lawyer, yes. His office is in Gresham Street. Above the shirt shop.”

  His mother turned to Sam. “Will you go there? Explain everything to Mr. Flom. Tell him to get the papers ready.”

  On the following day the police questioned Julie Armitage in the office, and took away a stack of Asher Ruppta’s files. Julie seemed agitated after the interview, and was strangely abrupt. “You should have told me about your mother,” she said to Sam. “What have you got to hide?”

  “Nothing at all, Julie.”

  “Shake the other one. Go on. Ring those bells.” She suddenly relented her tone. “I haven’t told them everything I know,” she told him. She looked him in the face, almost greedily. “What a can of worms.”

  When Sally explained to him the details of her relationship with Ruppta
and the birth of a son, Sam was delighted. He had sensed that there was some connection between himself and Ruppta, but now that had been proved in the most unexpected manner. When he went to see his mother, three days later, he found the house empty. She opened the front door herself. “The girls have gone,” she told him. “They understood.” She led him to the small room with the blue vase of flowers. And there, to his surprise, sat a boy of thirteen or fourteen years. He was wearing a grey school blazer, and grey trousers. He looked up at Sam with a calm and steady gaze. “This is Andrew,” she said. “Andrew, say hello to Sam.”

  “Hello, Sam.” The boy stood up and gravely shook his hand.

  “I’m sorry about your father.”

  “It was rather awkward. Mother and I are in a bit of a spot, to put it mildly. But my chums rallied round. And my housemaster has been an absolute brick.” He looked calmly at Sam. “Half-brother,” he said. He pronounced it very carefully. “My word. It came as rather a shock. Following my father, if you see what I mean—” He burst into tears, but then quickly recovered. “Sorry about that.”

  “Under the circumstances—”

  “I gather that you worked for him.”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Did he strike you as being a fair-minded sort of person?”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you only think so?” He did not wait for an answer. “I believe that my father was not properly understood. He was the soul of charity, you know. Grants to institutions and so forth. But he was a little too diffident for his own good. He was, like me, rather an introvert.” Sam noticed the boy’s hair that consisted of tight black curls, as if his personality had somehow boiled over. “Still, I mustn’t gabble on.”

  “There is something I want to tell you, Sam.” Sally sat down at the table behind them, and took out a cigarette. “Asher has left his business to me. To turn it over to Andrew when he is twenty-one. So, you see, you will be working for me. You and Julie will have to teach me all the tricks.”

  “I don’t think there will be any tricks, Mother.”

  “It’s just a phrase, Andrew.”

  “Still, Mother, we must start as we mean to go on. That’s another phrase.”

  Over the next few days Sam, Julie and Sally sat down together in order to go through Ruppta’s investments and properties. Sally was intent upon all of the details—who paid through a bank account and who paid in cash? Who paid weekly or monthly? What was the condition of each flat and house?

  “You cannot observe and measure at the same time,” Sam said to her. “If you measure you cannot observe and, if you observe, you cannot measure. I can measure all the rooms and all the incomes for you. But if I observe instead, I see a picture of human misery.”

  His mother looked at him in astonishment. “Well, Sam, you have set me thinking. You know how these tenants live, don’t you?”

  “Mainly they live from day to day. They scrape by. They worry about paying me the rent each week. They struggle.”

  “I know that Asher made a lot of money out of his flats.”

  “But that’s the point, isn’t it?” Julie’s eyes were very bright. “We’re supposed to make money, aren’t we? It’s all very well for Sam to say that they struggle. We all struggle. I struggle. If Mr. Ruppta had not paid me a wage, I would have been in the poorhouse. Where did he get the money to pay me that wage? It stands to reason. From the money you collected, Sam.” She slammed her hand, palm down, onto the table. Sam was surprised by her vehemence, but he chose not to argue with her. He would speak to his mother privately, to see what could be done for the poorer tenants.

  On the following day he was asked to go to the police station for a formal interview about the afternoon he found Asher Ruppta’s body. He was questioned by the same inspector who had come to the house. “We have learned a lot more since I last saw you.” Inspector Sutherland had a soft voice and tremulous eyes. “We know, if I may say so, a lot more about you.” He was polite, almost deferential, to Sam as if he were in some way intimidated by him. Sam sensed this, too, and was bewildered by it. “You are Sally’s son, are you not?” Sam nodded. “And your mother had—was close to Mr. Ruppta? Would that be a fair thing to say?”

  “I didn’t know about that. Until after.”

  “Naturally not. Very understandable.” They were facing each other, across a table, in a small boxlike room without windows. “You were right about the amber dagger, by the way. You seemed to know about it. I was impressed.”

  “It was the only dagger I could see.”

  “But how did you guess that he had been killed by that dagger specifically? That was an inspired choice. Hole in one. Was it you who told me that he had fallen down the stairs before his throat had been cut?”

  Sam was puzzled. “No.”

  “Funny. I thought it was you. No. Of course not. How could you know such a thing? As it happens, he fell after his throat was cut. Some spatters of blood were found on the wall at the top of the stairs. Did he fall or was he pushed? What do you think, Sam?” Sam shrugged his shoulders. “But if you were a betting man, what would you fancy? Go on. Have a flutter.” Inspector Sutherland looked imploringly at Sam; his expression seemed almost comical. Then he laughed himself, as if appreciating the joke. Sam laughed, too, despite the fact that he was not feeling very comfortable with the tone of Sutherland’s questions. “I suspect that the deceased—” Here he adjusted his tie. “That the deceased knew his attacker. There is no sign of a forced entry, you see. No sign of a struggle. He might have been having a quiet chat on the landing of the staircase. I can see it, can’t you? It’s a lovely house, it really is. I’ve read the will. Your mother gets it.”

  “She gets the business, too.”

  “Oh yes. Naturally.”

  “In trust for her son.”

  “Not you of course. The other one.”

  “I also have two brothers.”

  “Oh?” He seemed interested in this suddenly presented fact. “Do they know—”

  “They don’t.”

  “Let sleeping dogs lie?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, this has been a most satisfactory conversation.” Sutherland rubbed the palms of his hands together and smiled cheerfully before jumping to his feet. “I know where to find you. If I should need you again.”

  Sam was thoughtful, and a little apprehensive, as he made his way back to Camden Town. A bird fluttered and flew out of a hedge on the road home, startling him. He arrived home at twilight. It was that period, in late October, when the clocks were put backwards by an hour. So the evenings had become darker earlier. He entered the empty house with a sigh, but he did not put on the light. He preferred to sit in the front room until his eyes had become accustomed to the gloom and he could see the familiar objects around him. He did not care for the unnatural light of the electric bulb; it lent a false brightness to the world, and made him uneasy.

  Someone knocked very loudly at the door. He hesitated, and then went out. It was his mother. “I thought you must have been in the kitchen,” she said. “There was no light.”

  “I was just sitting.”

  “May I come in?” He made way for her, and followed her into the front room before switching on the light. “I haven’t been here since—since it happened. Nothing much has changed, has it?”

  “Dad didn’t do much to it. No.”

  “Still that old radio. It must be an antique by now. Are you still in your old room?”

  “I’m in Harry’s.”

  “Treating yourself.” She stepped into the kitchen. “It’s smaller than I remembered it.”

  “Sometimes,” he said, “I feel the world closing in.”

  “Sam, that’s one of the reasons I’m here. I’d like you to move in with us. Andrew is away at school for some of the time, so you would make good company. You would be much more comfortable in Borough. And we can set up the business there. I’ve given it a lot of thought. There’s no need to be in th
e middle of town. It’s a tiring place.”

  “What about his house in Highgate?”

  “I’m selling it. Andrew wants me to.” She sat down at the kitchen table. “Make me a cup of tea, will you?” She was silent as he prepared and poured the tea. “Who do you think killed him, Sam?”

  “I think he may have been blackmailing people.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me.” She sipped her tea. “What do you think of Julie?”

  “What?”

  “There’s something odd about her. I can’t put my finger on it. Don’t you think it funny that, on the day Asher died, she was visiting her sister in Folkestone? She told me that her sister was a bit dotty. Forgetful.”

  “What are you getting at, Mum?”

  “The dotty sister makes a good alibi, doesn’t she?”

  “Why on earth would Julie want to murder Mr. Ruppta?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”

  XVII

  Ants in your pants

  WHEN HARRY Hanway broke the news of Asher Ruppta’s murder to Sir Martin Flaxman, his father-in-law crowed with delight. “The crook has been killed, has he? How was it done?”

  “I’m trying to find out the details now.”

  “Now’s the time to go after him. Print everything you’ve got. Nothing wrong with fucking the dead. You can’t catch anything.”

  Harry Hanway noted, as he put down the telephone, that Sir Martin seemed to have recovered his good humour.

  Lady Flaxman came for dinner that night at Mount Street. “Pass me the rat poison,” she said almost as soon as she had entered the house. “The kraken wakes.”

  “What do you mean, Mummy?”

  “I mean your father. The old fool has come back to life. Jesus wept.” She elaborated on this theme over dinner. “I knew he was getting better when he swore at me. And he kicked out with his foot. With his foot.” She repeated the phrase very slowly and distinctly.

  “What else would he use, Mummy?”

  “Nothing is beyond that man. And he has gone red again. Like a cockataw or whatever the horrible creature is called.”