The Old English Peep Show

by Peter Dickinson

  His ten minutes about up, he walked back past the main frontage, and the now-stilled fountain. Dr. Kirtle was getting into his car by the colonnade entrance, but got out again and came toward Pibble.

  “Must apologize,” he whispered. “Daresay you thought me no end of an ass—quite unfit to do my job.”

  “Not at all,” lied Pibble.

  “Kind of you,” said the Doctor. “Truth is I was talking to the Admiral about a month gone by—no, more like six weeks—and the subject of post-mortems came up. He told me—surprised me a bit—that the whole idea revolted him; he couldn’t bear the thought of anyone he’d known being cut open. So when they called me in for Deakin I thought I’d try to spare him—England owes him a lot, you know. But I’ve just been talking to him and he seemed quite happy about the whole thing. Complete volte-face. He didn’t seem very interested—didn’t even look up from his paper, but I got the message all right. Course it’s far better if we do the job properly. I’ll put it in hand at once.”

  “Fine,” said Pibble, embarrassed—he liked the Doctor, dammit. “Thank you very much,” he added dimly. It seemed to be enough, for the Doctor minced back to his car and drove away.

  Mrs. Singleton was waiting in the winy air of the colonnade, like an embodiment of all autumnal sweetness.

  “You mustn’t mind about Fred,” she said. “His world begins and ends with us.”

  “All policemen expect to be resented,” said Pibble. “It’s part of the training. I hadn’t realized how many of you were involved in the Raid. I bet if they make a film of it they’ll find a place for you in a landing craft.”

  Mrs. Singleton laughed her ambrosial laugh.

  “Actually they made two films,” she said. “They turned Harvey into an American for one of them, and the actress who played me—Phyllis Calvert it was—was parachuted in to St. Quentin to join the Resistance and guide the ships in. It was awful nonsense, but the other one was very good and accurate—I’m surprised you didn’t see it. Harvey arranged for us to have some sort of royalty, and it did terribly well, especially in the Commonwealth, and that’s what gave him the capital to develop Herryngs the way he has. It pays for itself now, of course, but only just. Luncheon is ready and the Admiral’s been ringing up your office to try and find out what you like to drink—your sergeant said beer, I hope that’s all right.”

  “Lovely,” said Pibble thankfully, but wondering what oubliettes lay beneath this lush expanse of red carpet.

  As they went into the dimness of the hall, a small erect figure came forward, holding out his hand. The Admiral had none of his brother’s exaggerated strut; he wore a quiet tweed suit; his voice was quiet, too, almost a murmur.

  “Come along, Superintendent,” he said, “you’re just in time. Want a pee?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Come in, then; we all help ourselves and are very informal.”

  He led the way into a room on the right-hand side of the passage. Really it was no more than a paneled nook left over from the construction of two shapelier rooms; a circular rosewood table nearly filled it. Mr. Singleton and a girl were talking over on the far side, by a crowded hot plate.

  “That smells good,” said the Admiral. “Pheasant stew. Waste of good meat to roast them, don’t you agree, Superintendent?” He rubbed his pale hands together. His face was pale, too, with no tan to hide the lichenlike marks of old age; but apart from that and the absence of a mustache and the trimmer eyebrows, he really was astonishingly like his brother. Carried his head at a different angle, perhaps …

  “I think you’ve met my nephew,” he said. “Judith, this is Superintendent Pibble, who has come to sort us out; Superintendent, this is our secretary, Judith Scoplow.”

  Nothing special about her, really: a tall girl with a flat, pale face and hair that would probably have been mouse without the help of a copper rinse. She wore it lightly backcombed into a sort of half helmet, kept in place by a broad brown Alice band.

  “How do you do,” she said, and at once Pibble looked at her again. There was something special about her, once you had heard the voice; something happy, easy, confident, innocent; something dizzily out of keeping with this mansion of rich decay. Despite a couple of pimples below the corner of her wide mouth, she was beautiful, too. Pibble revised an earlier guess: the General’s staglike strut down the steps had not meant he was on his way to visit a woman—it meant he had just been talking with one, had just seized an opportune half minute to sniff the deliriant bouquet of youth.

  Queuing for his pheasant stew, Pibble struggled with the sense of having met someone like her in the past. (He struggled, too, with the knowledge that she was the kind of woman who would have that effect on men, a barely sophisticated variant of the urge to say “Haven’t I met you before?”) He was disconcerted out of both struggles by his encounter with the stewpot, which turned out to contain chunks of bird in a sauce heavy with cream and brandy; there was a little dish of fried diced apple by the side. Left to itself, his subconscious did the trick—that girl in the Salinski case! He was so pleased with himself that he took a double helping of creamed potatoes.

  Anne something. And Salinski (fortyish, shiny-bald, dapper) had faked a brake failure and let his new Rover run over a cliff with his smart little wife in it, all on the strength of a barely more than nodding acquaintance with this Anne. Again, it had been only when she’d answered Pibble’s first question—there’d been a smell of collusion because Salinski had tried to use her as an element in his timetable alibi—that Pibble had realized that Salinski was perfectly sane. And in the end both counsels, for defense and prosecution, had outdone each other in courtesies, the judge had been a shade more than paternal, and several hard-nosed reporters had attempted to play down her role in their copy. Poor little pigeon, by the time she stepped down from the witness box she was the only person in the whole court who still didn’t understand how Salinski could have done such a thing. And here was another of them. Well, well; no wonder the General had gone down toward his phallic car with the swagger of a hart at leaf fall.

  “Come and sit here, my dear fellow, and tell me tall stories about life as a famous policeman.” The Admiral was pulling out a chair on his right. Mrs. Singleton was already prodding a minute piece of bird on the other side of the gap.

  “Your sergeant tells me that you know more about beer than anyone else in London,” said the Admiral. “I’d value your opinion on this—we brew it ourselves. I believe it’s a shade on the sweet side for the real purist, but we are trying to gratify the perverse palate of our American cousins.”

  Mr. Singleton butted in from the other side of the table.

  “I commissioned a little firm in Chicago to market-research the American idea of what English beer ought to taste like.”

  “Courages at Alton were very nice to us,” added the Admiral. “They sent a chap over to advise us how to get as near to Harvey’s ideal as we could. I know a couple of chaps on the board, ’smatter of fact.”

  “I think it’s horrible,” said Mrs. Singleton, and sipped exaggeratedly from her glass of Burgundy.

  Bodingly, Pibble lifted his tankard, and was surprised: true the beer was too sweet and a bit on the dark side; it was like one of those special brews which a few colleges in ancient universities specialize in, but it wasn’t flat, as they tend to be; it had a creamy sparkle which suggested that the barrel must be in tiptop condition. He said so.

  “I’m glad to hear you say that,” said Mr. Singleton. “To be frank, I never let them keep anything left over. We throw away yesterday’s barrel and start on a new one. Brewing’s an extraordinarily cheap process, given the equipment.”

  “But are you sure that’s what you want, Mr. Pibble?” said the Admiral solicitously. “There’s some of Harvey’s plonk if you prefer, or there ought to be another of these”—he pointed to his own half bottle of Pommery—“in the
fridge, or you could have some of our excellent water, as dear Judith does.”

  “It’s the nicest water I ever tasted,” said Miss Scoplow. “A marvelous old man brings it up from the spring in two wooden buckets which he carries with a sort of yoke.”

  “I’m happy with this, thank you,” said Pibble, wondering which level of the treasure house of police fantasy he should tap to please the Admiral’s lust for gruesome tales. (Scotland Yard has an oral tradition rich enough to keep a college of Opies busy.) He needn’t have bothered, for the old hero seemed set on talking about his lions, which he did with a mild but insistent volubility, often keeping hold of the conversation by simply repeating some tidbit which he had already rolled out. It was during one of these da capos that Pibble revised his opinion of Mrs. Adamson’s lion books, which, when he’d read them, he’d thought had a too-good-to-be-true quality. She must have covered the ground pretty thoroughly, he now saw, since there was nothing in the Admiral’s mellifluous monologue which he didn’t already know. He seized a moment when the hero’s mouth was full to ask him whether he’d enjoyed the books.

  “What books?” said the Admiral, emphasizing his famous deafness by cupping a curiously lobeless ear.

  “Elsa!” shouted Mrs. Singleton. It wasn’t exactly a shout, though: she just notched her hound voice up another intensity and produced a word which was still clearly spoken but could have halted a marching regiment. Two more intensities and the windowpanes would have fallen out.

  “What’s the matter with her?” said the Admiral. “You are never satisfied with your food, Anty, not even in the nursery, I remember. Would you believe it, Superintendent—”

  The door opposite him opened and a little old woman with a crossly crimson face stood there.

  “Did I hear you call, Miss Anty?” she said.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry, Elsa,” said Mrs. Singleton. “I didn’t mean you. We were talking about lions.”

  “Nasty heathenish things,” snarled the cook. “It’s all very well for you to say they only eat black men, but who’s to know they won’t acquire the taste and we’ll all be gnawed to pieces in our beds?”

  The Admiral didn’t even look in her direction, but turned exaggeratedly toward Pibble.

  “No, that’s a very interesting aspect of lion psychology,” he said. “Some of them do literally acquire a taste for man-flesh, and can’t be satisfied with anything else. There’s not been any research done on man-eating, though, for obvious …”

  His soft voice was almost a whisper, but the cook looked at him, put her hands over her ears, and rushed out.

  “Now you’ve upset her,” said Mr. Singleton to the room in general. “Go and soothe her down, Anty.”

  Mrs. Singleton rose and left. Pibble sat in a daze. How in holy hell had they thought they could get away with it? Who had persuaded whom? And what in God’s name were they up to, to make it necessary? He pulled himself together to listen to his host, who was murmuring again about lions, but during the monologue he kept thinking of other little bits of confirmation: the Epstein and the cook had started him off; then there were the Adamson books; the General’s stagy departure; the locked door upstairs; Singleton’s whispering—to emphasize the Admiral’s presence behind it; the mere necessity of having a policeman down from London for a case that didn’t warrant it; the too-painstaking collusion in social hypnotism which he’d felt so strongly in the meat store; the volte-face over post-mortem … Oh, Crippen! And presumably Deakin had looked after the Admiral’s shoes, hung up his clothes, taken his trays up, made his bed, even.

  When Mrs. Singleton came back, she simply nodded to her husband and sat down. Pibble felt edgy now, but couldn’t decide whether the others did, too, or whether he was attributing his own unease to them. Only Miss Scoplow seemed uninfected with this social itch; she talked little but listened to Mr. Singleton’s jerky explanation of the economics of the wine trade with great animation; she had a pleasant trick of showing interest by opening her eyes absurdly wide, so that the white showed all around the iris. She gave the impression that she could have listened with intense delight to an account of a golf match between two moderate players on a featureless plain.

  But Mr. Singleton’s lecture seemed not to stimulate even himself; he had the tense air of an actor ad-libbing while he waits for a colleague to make a delayed entrance. Mrs. Singleton turned one fragment of meat over and over, as if it were the last piece of a jigsaw which was somehow the wrong shape for the last hole. And the old hero was now retailing complete myth as certified lion lore, even the false claw in the tail with which the beast is supposed to lash itself into a frenzy of rage, like some hack satirist.

  “No pudding,” said Mrs. Singleton suddenly, “and we’ve eaten the last of the nectarines. There’s blue Cheshire and grapes and apples.”

  The shuffling to remove plates and queue (in charadelike parody of housewives at a greengrocer’s) for muscats and pippins (not Cox or Ribston—something Pibble had never met before) broke the tension. As they settled again, Clavering turned to Miss Scoplow­ and told her all the legends he had just told Pibble, while she listened to each nonsensical detail with astonished eyes. This left Pibble free for the first time to enjoy Mrs. Singleton’s presence; the contrast with Miss Scoplow served to emphasize her musky, autumnal quality. You soon got used to the voice; it wasn’t, after all, loud, just penetrating. She must know what was up, Pibble decided, but Miss Scoplow mightn’t. If she thought of Adam the Gardener as “a marvelous old man,” she must be either shortsighted or unobservant.

  “You seem to take an enormous amount of trouble over detail,” he said. “Bringing your water up in buckets on a yoke, I mean. There can’t be much chance for tourists to photograph that, however picturesque.”

  “Don’t you believe it,” said Mrs. Singleton, with her liqueur-like chuckle. “Harvey sees to it that it’s done while there’s a party going down the colonnade; Rastus walks up just below those windows. Besides, we’d have the water brought up from the spring anyway. As Judith says, it’s much nicer than the mains; there being a picturesque man to do it is just luck.”

  “Is that the man I saw spraying ferns on the way to the big Kitchen, dressed up like the gardener in those old Express strip cartoons?”

  “That’s right—we call him Rastus. Do you follow the strips? I always read them first.”

  They fell into a half-bantering discussion of the protagonists of the thought balloon, discovered a joint admiration for the earliest Four-D Jones strips, and were discussing middle-period Garth plots when the grate of tires on the gravel outside brought Mrs. Singleton to her feet (her hearing seemed to be as keen as her voice).

  “That’s Carl Spruheim, Harvey,” she said. “You go and let him in while I fetch the coffee. We’ll have it in my sitting room.”

  Both Singletons left. Pibble allowed them twenty seconds before he rose, too.

  “There’s just something I ought to check on before I talk to the Coroner,” he said casually, moving as he spoke toward the door so that he was already through it before Clavering had a chance to answer. He ran across the hall and up the stairs; he was panting, more with nerves than exertion, before he reached the first landing. He plugged on.

  The barrel of the big key still protruded through the lock of the Admiral’s door, but the door didn’t open—so there must be another entrance. He nipped into Deakin’s pantry and took a pair of crocodile pliers from the pegboard, but he found that though he could grip the barrel with the pliers held sideways, the mahogany beading of the door panels prevented him from turning the key far enough, so he had to run back for a blunt-ended pair. Sweating now, he tried again; the serrations of the jaws slipped on the metal, making bright parallel gouges, then held. Contorting his body so that he did not have to take a fresh grip, he moved the key around until he heard the big wards click over. He dropped the pliers and turned the handle. The door opened.


  But before he had moved it an inch, a weight thudded into it from the far side and slammed it shut. Pibble gripped the handle and twisted, throwing all his weight against the mahogany. A child? he wondered—there ought to be some Singleton kids about. Anyway, the door gave, and he jammed his foot into the opening and forced the gap wider, easily enough, with the leverage of knee and shoulder. Then the resistance ceased suddenly and only the inertia of the heavy mahogany saved him; if it had been a flimsy door, he would have fallen sprawling into the secret room. As it was, he entered with an ungainly stagger, to find Clavering, a little flushed and ruffled, facing him with chilly dignity. Who’d have thought the old man had so much agility in him, to race up here so fast and wrestle with the far side of the door?

  “What the devil do you think you’re up to?” said the old man with icy fierceness but in the wrong voice.

  Pibble didn’t answer but looked around the room. The hairy jacket, yellow waistcoat, and twill trousers were flung across the bed; not good enough—they might both have duds like that. Two Elsa books lay on the desk; nothing like good enough. One of a set of fitted cupboards in the right-hand wall was open, with the corner of a washbasin showing. Pibble walked across and found what he wanted, an uncleaned safety razor with a number of half-inch white bristles stuck in it, a tube of Helena Rubinstein “Tan in a Minute,” a lot of tan-smeared tissues in the wastepaper basket, a pair of nail scissors, even a scattering of shorter, curving bristles on the carpet. As he was wrapping the razor and specimens of his other prizes in clean tissues from the box, Mrs. Singleton’s voice came from the room.