The Old English Peep Show

by Peter Dickinson

  “Poor Deakin’s death is not a scandal—by no means; I hope you won’t think that. In fact it’s a great sadness to us all, a great sadness, but journalists of the type I have described are distressingly willing to exaggerate a minor calamity of this sort into a major event, and to dress up their imaginings with irrelevant gossip. Now, from one or two things which have happened in the past year we have come to believe that there is at least one officer in the local force who is more than willing to abet these gentry in their efforts. We could, and I put it to you fairly, pull yet more strings and have the men posted elsewhere, but if we took that course and the facts leaked out, we would be running the risk of an even greater scandal; so for the most part we put up with them, and with the tiresome little insinuations about thefts and vandalism here of which they are the source. But in this case, to put it bluntly, we decided to circumvent them.”

  “Rang up the Chief Constable,” broke in the General. “Bit of an ass, but not a bad chap. Know him well. Squared it with him.”

  “I hope you understand,” said Mr. Singleton, leaning earnestly forward like a politician leaning toward a TV camera for a peroration. “You may feel that we have called you down here over a trivial matter, but I assure you it is not trivial to us, even at this stage of the season. May I take it that you concur?”

  “Of course,” muttered Pibble, shrinking further back into the bosomy cushions, half hypnotized by the dull, plangent voice. No point in telling them they were making a mistake: this, if anything, was the way to cause a stink, even if the Coroner was as tidily under their thumb as the Chief Constable seemed to be. And, Crippen, think if it had been Harry Brazzil! He’d have arrived with a carload of friends from Fleet Street.

  “Doubtful?” said the General.

  “It’s only that routine procedures usually turn out to be least trouble in the end,” said Pibble. “But you’re stuck with me now, so there’s no point in worrying about it.”

  “Sound fellow,” said the General. “What would you like to do first?”

  “Perhaps Mr. Singleton could tell me about finding the body; then I could ask any questions that occurred to me, and then we could look at the place where he died. I must see the body, and talk to the doctor who examined it—I suppose it’s in Southampton. I ought also to talk to any of the local police who have already been involved; it would be madness, from your point of view, if I didn’t.”

  “Quite right,” said the General, springing from his chair. He picked an internal telephone off the desk and pressed one of the dozen buttons that lined its base.

  “Judith? Arrange to get Dr. Kirtle out here at once, please. Ask him if he’d be kind enough to pick up Sergeant Maxwell on his way. Then ring up the police station and see that you talk to Roberts, not Flagstaff. Ask him to arrange for Maxwell to be free in ten minutes’ time for about an hour, and say that Dr. Kirtle will pick him up. Got all that? Good lass.”

  “The body’s still here,” said Mr. Singleton. “We have a spare cold-storage room which we hardly use at this time of year, with the visitors tailing off; to be frank, they have nothing as suitable in town, and Southampton’s a long way for you to drive over to. As for what happened, I never go to bed until three or four in the morning, and I have excellent hearing. There was a curious thud at about two, followed by a brief drumming, which I thought came from Uncle Dick’s floor. I do not normally go up there, but I felt it was my duty to investigate. The light was on in Deakin’s pantry, and the door was open. He was hanging by a rope from a pipe across the ceiling; his stool was lying on the floor; he was still swinging. I cut the rope with one of his chisels and lowered him to the floor to administer the kiss of life, a technique in which I have taken instruction. It was not efficacious. Indeed, Dr. Kirtle told me afterward that it could not have been, as Deakin had broken his neck.”

  “Hanged himself bloody neatly,” said the General approvingly. “Deakin was always a thoroughly seamanlike fellow.”

  “Didn’t Sir Richard hear any of this?” said Pibble.

  “My brother’s a bit deaf,” said the General. “Sailors never learn; they will go standing too near those bloody great guns they affect. He’s very cut up about it, particularly about not hearing, as a matter of fact. That’s one reason why he’s left it to us to cope with you.”

  “And the other reason?” said Pibble.

  “He’s an author,” said the General, with his silly giggle, “and authors mustn’t be bothered.”

  Mr. Singleton sighed, the despairing exhalation of the puritan confronted with frivolity.

  “Let me be honest with you,” he said. “The Claverings don’t give a damn for anybody. I have reasoned with them, but they still insist on behaving with all the social irresponsibility of their grandparents.”

  The General leaned back in his chair, beaming as at a compliment.

  “At the moment,” said Mr. Singleton, “Uncle Dick is absorbed in writing a book about lions. We have some here, as you may be aware—indeed we make quite a feature of them. Uncle Dick has not interested himself much in the business side of the Herryngs enterprise, but a year ago he began to study the lions very seriously, very seriously indeed.”

  “He’s had papers published in zoological journals,” said the General with motherly pride. “He’s got a theory that in a couple of generations there won’t be any wild animals left; they’ll all have to be kept in conditions like ours because pressure of human population will have squeezed them out of their habitats. Dick says these fellows who insist on studying them in the wild are all to cock, and will be out of date in a jiffy. Thing is to know as much as possible about them in captivity. Gets letters from dozens of zoos every day, you know. Costs us a fortune in stamps.”

  Harvey laughed suddenly, with the tolerant amusement of the expert.

  “It hardly costs us a penny, General,” he said. “Anything concerned with the welfare of the lions is an allowable expense. Be that as may be, Superintendent, Uncle Dick works at his book from nine to twelve-thirty every morning, and refuses to be disturbed. But there will be plenty to keep you occupied until luncheon, and then he can tell you all you need to know about Deakin’s private life, which was, to be frank, negligible. The General is going to Chichester shortly, so if you can think of anything you wish to ask him now, that would be convenient.”

  “I shall have to have a word with the Coroner at some point,” said Pibble.

  “Coming out this afternoon,” said the General. “Always comes on the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month.”

  “He’s one of our solicitors,” explained Mr. Singleton, “and I have enough business with him to make a regular appointment worth while. You can see him before I do, and if you both agree that this matter is as straightforward as it appears to me, you will be able to catch the four-forty back to London.”

  “Almost all suicides are straightforward, in one sense,” said Pibble. “Anybody except a complete bungler can kill himself if he really wants to, and leave no doubt about how he did it. But in another sense almost all suicides are mysterious, because we find it difficult to imagine ourselves reaching that pitch of desperation or resentment or whatever in which we’d take our own lives. However clear the time and method of Deakin’s death may be, you’ll find most people wondering why he did it—I think you’d have told me if he’d left a note.”

  “No note,” said the General. “Too tidy and secretive for that—early pot training, I daresay. But Deakin was a randy little fellow, always hanging around after Harvey’s serving wenches. You haven’t seen him, but he was the hairiest little runt I ever clapped eyes on, and you know what they say about hairy runts. It’s rubbish, of course—I’m a hairy runt myself, and I’ve always run neck and neck with Dick in the fornication stakes, and he’s nothing like as hairy. Course, if I’d been a hairy runt and a sailor—”

  He broke off with his bizarre giggle, suggesting in the a
posiopesis whole littorals of dishonored womanhood. Mr. Singleton’s implacable drone brought the conversation back to the coxswain in the cold-storage room.

  “Our theory,” he said, “is that Deakin was crossed in love. I am forced to employ a number of attractive girls and, though I have no wish to speak ill of the dead, he was in the habit of pestering them. He was, to put it bluntly, an unprepossessing specimen, and they used to lead him on and let him down. I must admit that tempers tend to wear thin by this stage of the season. By the way, General, I doubt if we can employ Waugh for another year—he was incapable again last night. I’m sorry, Superintendent, but there is so much to think of. I’ve told Mrs. Hurley, who is in general charge of the girls, to find out what she can, but she has not yet produced a solution.”

  “Fine,” said Pibble. “That’s all I can think of for the moment. What are you going to see in Chichester, sir?”

  Social unease stalked into the room, like a ghost walking over a live man’s grave. Pibble couldn’t conceive what solecism he’d committed, as both the men stared at him in withdrawn surprise. Then the General giggled and the ghost was exorcised.

  “What’ll I see?” he sang, in a creaky countertenor, “I’ll see the sea.”

  Mr. Singleton sighed again, the sigh which Pibble, after years of working with certain police colleagues, recognized as that of a man faced with a levity he has not the authority to reprimand.

  “The General is going sailing,” he said, “not to the theatre.”

  “God forbid,” said the General. “I’m the last of the Philistines, Superintendent. I’ll see you at the inquest, no doubt.”

  He left with a bouncy little strut, rising slightly onto the ball of his foot at each step. Mr. Singleton sighed for the third time as the door closed, but this time the sigh suggested that conversation would now be easier, without the monitoring presence from a dead generation. He rose and walked to the window. He really was unusually tall, at least six feet four. He stood for half a minute gazing through the glass, and then spoke without turning his head. There was a softer note in his robotlike utterance.

  “This is the most marvelous view in the world, though I say it myself. I draw deep inspiration from it every day.”

  It would have been churlish not to go and share such a view, so Pibble weltered out of the sofa and crossed the room. His first reaction was that Mr. Singleton’s source of inspiration was curiously dreamlike and escapist for so drearily pragmatic a man. They were looking at almost the same vista as the one he had glimpsed earlier from the colonnade, but the extra angle achieved by the jut of the Private Wing brought the Main Block into the picture, altering the whole perspective so that the further colonnade and the Kitchen Wing were no longer merely pretty in themselves, but became a necessary balance to the huge elegance of the central building. Down the first slope stood the famous lime tree, a solid fountain of yellowing leaf with a small herd of dappled deer grazing at its foot, and beyond that the traditional English landscape, at its most mistily genteel, rolled away into blueness.

  As an extra touch to the artificiality of the scene, there was a scarlet blob in the foreground, like the red buoy Turner used to pop into the foreground of his seascapes on varnishing day, except that this was an E-Type Jaguar convertible standing on the gravel below them. It really was below them, as the slope of the ground left the Private Wing a story higher this side than the other. The car looked posed, as though for a color advertisement, but as they gazed over those leagues of plebs-concealing greenness a glass door in the colonnade opened and the General came prancing down the steps to the drive. His peculiar, dainty, arrogant gait reminded Pibble instantly of the movements of stags, such as those that grazed under the lime tree—something poised, limber, and fierce, but at the same time preserved (carefully and against the odds) into an alien age and climate.

  Pibble knew at once that he wasn’t going to Chichester to sail, either. There must be a woman there.

  The General didn’t actually leap into the car as though it were a saddle, but he settled into his seat like a man used to horses. The extending bonnet became an expression of his personality. He raised one hand in a theatrically romantic salute to their window and roared away, gravel spitting in twin arcs behind his half-spinning wheels.

  “A very great man indeed,” said Mr. Singleton plonkingly.

  Before Pibble could answer, they were distracted by a new unreality in the panorama: out from behind one of the copses in the middle distance, crawling along a low embankment, came Stephenson’s Rocket; slow puffs of purplish smoke whuffled from its ridiculous smokestack, and the monstrous cylinders on either side pumped like the legs of a grasshopper. Behind the engine came a dozen open trucks which carried about forty solemn citizens, wearing anachronistic bonnets and stovepipe hats. Only the incessant working of their limbs as they clicked, focused, panned, whirred, and hectically changed films showed that they were the same group of Americans that had shared Pibble’s train.

  “If an airliner exploded over here,” he said, “you’d have a perfect­ record of the event. There’d be bound to be at least one cine­camera pointing skyward at any given moment.”

  “Couldn’t happen,” said Mr. Singleton. “I’ve had them all routed out of our air space. What would our visitors think of Old England if we allowed bloody great Boeings to come whining over during a peak moment like the execution? Excuse me.”

  He picked up the intercom.

  “Judith? Yes, I know—we saw him go. Did he say anything important to you? No, I’ve got him here. O.K., fine, you’ve done very well. Now, look, will you get on to Fritz and tell him he’s putting too much color into that damned smoke again—we don’t want them all thinking their films have been wrongly developed. Good. When Kirtle and that policeman turn up, put them in the Zoffany Room. We’ll be in Deakin’s pantry for about ten minutes, and then over in the Kitchens, in the meat store. Right. Look after yourself.”

  Pibble had been half listening, vaguely aware of the sudden liveliness of tone, but really more interested by the way the Rocket disappeared into the next cutting—slowly, not with the rush and thump of a modern train slogging into a tunnel, but more like a millipede wriggling under a stone. There was something appealingly pathetic about it—such a weak, hopeless mutation of transport to have sired the snorting generations of the Iron Horse.

  “That all right by you?” said Mr. Singleton. “If that train’s on time, it is eleven-fifty-eight. You’ve time to see the pantry and the body, and then talk to the Doctor and Constable What’s-His-Name, before luncheon. Spruheim, the Coroner, will be here soon after luncheon, and I trust we’ll be able to put you on the four-forty with everything tidied up and ready for the inquest.”

  “That suits me very well,” said Pibble. “You must pay a fantastic amount of attention to detail. I enjoyed Mrs. Chuck’s ‘lawk-a-mussy’—how did you choose the vocabulary?”

  “I took a speed-reading course,” said Mr. Singleton. “I confess I would have done that in any case—it seems to me essential in this day and age—but the first major project I used it for was to read all Thomas Hardy and all Mary Webb. This way.”

  Pibble could no longer protract his drowning in that dream landscape, for Mr. Singleton was already holding the door for him. The stairs were wide and soft-carpeted, their edges emitting a drowsy smell of floor polish. A pretty mini-dome, glassed like the colonnade, provided light for the square central well. On the first landing, through an open door, he saw a maid vacuuming the floor of a happily proportioned bedroom.

  “One doesn’t think of big houses having bits like this in them,” he said, “where people can live a comfortable twentieth-century life.”

  He felt a fool the moment he said it, infected with the falsity of Herryngs, seduced into the suggestion that the Pibbles, too, dwelt habitually in marble, but in their case uncomfortable, halls, and maids vacuumed their bedroom. Singleton d
id not seem to notice the wrong note.

  “Yes,” he said as they started up the next flight, “but it is a wholly uneconomic arrangement. All this space could be … But I won’t bother you with irrelevant details.”

  The speed at which he went upstairs seemed to Pibble to be also a wholly uneconomic arrangement, but it wasn’t shortness of breath that had caused him to whisper. He approached the top landing with the reverence of a tourist who enters a two-star cathedral and finds a mass being sung.

  “Uncle Dick’s working in there,” breathed Mr. Singleton, pointing along the landing. (This landing was in fact a gallery running around all four sides of the stair well, with half a dozen doors opening off it. The door he pointed at had the barrel of a huge old key protruding half an inch through the keyhole.) “You can see he’s locked himself in. That’s his bathroom, that’s a spare bathroom, that’s Deakin’s pantry, that’s Deakin’s room, the other two are spare rooms which we seldom use. This is the key of the pantry. Perhaps you would prefer to unlock it yourself.”

  The key was the size of a hatchet, but moved effortlessly in the lock of the big door. “Pantry” turned out to be a curious name for what was more of a workshop, a small room smelling of oils and paints and fresh-cut timber. Most of the wall space was filled by cupboards, but a small workbench stood against the left-hand wall, and above it was fixed a large rectangle of pegboard, from whose hooks and clips hung a carefully ranged collection of excellent tools, all bearing that peculiar rich patina, on steel and wood, which comes from the endless rubbing of palms that have handled them often and properly. An upright chair stood by the sink under the window; there was a tiny cooker. On the bench was a finished but only half-painted model of a landing craft, about three feet long, and beside it a noose of rope cut off diagonally nine inches above the knot. The other piece of the rope was still hanging from a water pipe that crossed the ceiling. A kitchen stool lay diagonally across the linoleum.