The Old English Peep Show

by Peter Dickinson

The gate was locked and none of the keys fitted. Mr. Chanceley slid his load to the ground and propped it against a tree with a casualness that suggested he would have put it down head first if it had happened to lie that way.

  “I saw you took his pistol,” he said. “We can maybe shoot the lock out.”

  “I don’t think it’s worth it,” said Pibble. “If I take those three screws out, we can take the handle off and pull the whole lock sideways.”

  In the event, it was Mr. Chanceley who had to turn the screws with the gadget on Pibble’s penknife. Pibble was feeling weaker every stride, and when they reached the car park he was ready to buckle under the weight of a new problem.

  “We’ll never fit him into a two-seater,” he said.

  “We’ll lower the top and lay him longways,” said Mr. Chanceley. “You’ll have to find somewhere to squat, and you’d best look for a scarf for your sore throat, Mr. Pibble—it’ll be a mite cold.”

  “Let’s hope there’s a map in the car,” said Pibble. “I’m a stranger in these parts.”

  “Me, too,” said Mr. Chanceley.

  There was a map. The key was in the car. The top came down without trouble. Singleton fitted neatly in on the passenger seat with his feet in the long cavern under the dash and his head protruding over the folded top. Pibble, remembering how his own head had jogged on the journey down to the Abbey, insisted on using the two rugs in the car to wedge him into position, tying them to the straitjacket with one of Mr. Chanceley’s straps. He found a Shetland scarf for his own throat; Mr. Chanceley tried on the General’s deerstalker and rejected it; they settled themselves, Pibble perched on the top with his knees wedged behind the driving seat; the engine boomed its creamy note; three seconds later they were away, actually outside the purlieus of Herryngs House.

  11:40 P.M.

  It must, Pibble considered, be a peculiarly painful dilemma for the Night Sergeant at a provincial police station when a couple of obvious desperadoes carry in a perfect specimen of the local gentry and claim he is three times a murderer. The gentleman swears from his straitjacket that he is in the hands of madmen, in a chilly rational voice which demands obedience. One desperado—the more disreputable—produces documents which purport to show that he is a Detective Superintendent at Scotland Yard. The other desperado stands in the background uttering corroborative statements in a gangster’s accent. You, naturally, incline to believe the devil you know. The British delinquent, now clearly round the bend, produces a small pistol and says he will shoot you if you don’t ring up a London number which he claims to be that of the Assistant Commissioner of Police. You ask how you are to know that it is not the number of an accomplice, but offer to ring Scotland Yard and verify. Scotland Yard refuses to tell you the private number of the Assistant Commissioner of Police. The British desperado snatches the telephone from you and says, “Who’s that? Hilda? Oh, Mavis, I’m sorry. Pibble here, Superintendent Pibble. For God’s sake, give this chap the Ass. Com.’s number so that he can ring him up and check who I am.” She does so. You ring the new number, and a dry voice answers which does not sound like that of a desperado’s­ accomplice. It tells you that the tattered desperado is a senior officer of the force you are proud to serve in, and asks to speak to him. During­ the long conversation, you start trying to believe that the gentleman in the straitjacket, to whose every whim you have hitherto­ kowtowed, is an exceedingly dangerous criminal. The three of you lug him off to a cell, unstrap him while the American desperado­ points the pistol steadily at him, and lock him in. You then, on this Superintendent’s advice, get poor Fred Bulling out of bed, send him round to Mr. Roberts to have a bit of paper signed permitting you to arm him, and set him to watch the criminal gentleman’s cell. The desperadoes then depart in the General’s red E-type, as you’ve often winked an eye at doing eighty-five down the bypass.

  Pibble did not consider all this, of course, until later, while the deepmouthed engine surged them back toward Herryngs. The conversation with the Ass. Com. had gone reasonably well, though Pibble’s voice had given out halfway through his tale. There had been a longish pause when he finished.

  “No chance of playing the whole mess down?” the sour-lemon accents had said, at last. “It sounds as if you’ve done very well, Jimmy, but the trouble is people won’t like it at all. The Home Secretary, if I know him, will take it as a personal insult. You know the ground—is there a way of separating the Claverings’ deaths from this Singleton affair? Can we make theirs accidental?”

  Pibble had outlined his fairy tale in which the General died trying to rescue the Admiral from Bonzo.

  “Possible. What about Singleton? Think you can nail him for killing this manservant? Pathologists ought to be able to find traces of previous semi-strangulation, but could you make it stick to Singleton­?”

  Pibble had pointed to his own experience, and the mild evidence of the half-painted landing craft, but had added that he wasn’t even sure himself that Singleton had strangled Deakin.

  “I don’t feel greatly attracted to all this.” The voice had sounded petulant. “The journalists are sure to get wind of something if we try to hang on until we’ve had a report on the manservant, and then, as you say, how do we prove it was Singleton? I am dubious about simply nailing him for trying to hang you, though I imagine we could get him for that, at least, thanks to your providential witness. Police would come badly out of it, though. Ah, well, it looks as if we’ll have to go through with the whole caboosh—even then, a lot will depend on finding that bullet.”

  Pibble had observed that evidently the Claverings hadn’t found it, or there would have been no need to fill the lion so full of lead.

  “Right. Interesting point there—what would Singleton have done if Sir Ralph had picked up a Colt bullet in this pit of yours? Never mind about that now, though. I’ll get on to your local Chief Constable and get him to send some reinforcements out. I’ll get on to the Old Man, too, and tell him what we’re up to. My inclination is to turn the whole damn shooting match into a circus, give the news hounds their money’s worth and more, get the lovable British public too eager for gory details to feel the shock to our national pride. But I’ll have to talk it over with our masters. You realize that this means taking you off, Jimmy? You’re too involved now to be anything except a witness. I daresay you’ll be glad of that.”

  Pibble had agreed that he would. The voice became drier than ever.

  “Besides, we’ll need you as a scapegoat if things go wrong. You’ll see how we’ve decided to play it when you see who I send to take over. Meanwhile you’d best go back to Herryngs and stop anyone who’s left from killing each other. Go careful, Jimmy.”

  So here they were, turning for the second time that night through the magniloquent gateway. Mr. Chanceley, in boyish mood, made the car bellow down the half mile of avenue and took the curve by the fountain in a controlled skid which sent the gravel spattering across the pool. Pibble directed him around to the far side of the Private Wing.

  Mr. Waugh still lay in the shadow beneath the lit study windows, but someone had been out, rolled him onto a tarpaulin and covered him with rugs. His breathing was fast and shallow. As Pibble knelt to feel his pulse, the study window was thrown up.

  “Who’s that?” called Mrs. Singleton.

  “Me. Pibble.”

  “Thank heavens! I can’t think where everyone has got to. Mr. Waugh ought to go to hospital—he looks awful.”

  “Where is the hospital?”

  “In the town. I could drive him there if you could help get him into the car. I couldn’t manage it alone.”

  “No, you stay there—I want to talk to you. But would you please ring up the hospital and tell them what to expect, and then book a room for Mr. Chanceley at a good hotel, if there is one?”

  “God, they’ll never take anyone at this time of night!”

  “They’ll do it for you, won�
�t they?

  “I suppose so. Bring him round to the colonnade door and I’ll tell your friend where to go.”

  The window banged shut. The art of carrying inert butlers has not been adequately studied; it is difficult to achieve a proper grip on the unresisting steppes of flesh—even the omni­competent Mr. Chanceley let the shoulders slip twice before he changed tactics, backed the Jaguar across the blasphemed turf, and heaved the butler in in one swift movement. The big head lolled sideways, the mouth dangling open and emitting retching noises, but Pibble decided the man would have a better chance if he were shielded from the rush of midnight air, so they took time to put the top up, managing it far less neatly and surely than Singleton had earlier.

  Mrs. Singleton had finished her telephoning and was ready with unflurried directions for finding the hospital. Pibble bent to the car window to thank Mr. Chanceley, inadequately, for having saved his life.

  “My pleasure,” said the Texan flatly, and roared off.

  The fire in the study was freshly made up; the ashtrays were clean; as soon as they had sat down, Elsa stumped in with a tray of tea laid for two.

  “Please tell me what has happened,” said Mrs. Singleton, with about the concern shown by a parent at a P.T.A. meeting inquiring about a child’s poor reports. Pibble told her. She sighed as she poured out the tea.

  “Perhaps you’d prefer me to taste yours first,” she said.

  “Please,” said Pibble.

  She looked at him out of the side of her eyes, nodded, and took a good gulp.

  “Damn,” she said. “Burnt my throat. No arsenic, though. Now what?”

  “There must be a recorder somewhere on which I can play this tape,” said Pibble. She went out and came back with a green gadget which seemed to have more terminals protruding from it than was normal; it held only one spool, empty, so she threaded the new tape swiftly through and switched the machine on. Pibble rose to check that she had not set it to “Record,” which would have obliterated the previous signals, and returned to his chair toen to the faint hum. After two minutes he rose again.

  “Wait,” said Mrs. Singleton. “It fits onto the telephone.”

  More hum, and then suddenly the clatter of dialing. Then a voice saying, “Mr. Lanning’s residence,” and another—high-pitched, hysterical—saying, “I’ve got to speak to him.” Brief pause, then, “Mr. Lanning is in his bath, sir.” “Get him out,” said the second voice, clearly on the edge of a breakdown. “Tell him it’s Pibble.” A click, a faint sound of feet padding away, the whiffle of feverish breathing, and then a tired voice saying, “You in trouble, Jimmy?”

  The whole conversation was on the tape. It was as good as a suicide note. The Ass. Com. would have had a grisly time at the inquest if he’d tried to maintain that Pibble sounded his normal self. Unstable, remorseful, broken Pibble. And, Crippen, how much he’d told Singleton! He listened, numb at his own weakness and stupidity, until the green box settled back into its dead hum. Mrs. Singleton was looking at him with smiling concern.

  “You’ve had a bad day, Mr. Pibble,” she said. “And you haven’t finished yet, I suppose—you want to know how much I knew.”

  “Please,” said Pibble.

  “I knew that Uncle Dick was dead and that the General had shot him—or, rather, that’s what I thought. It didn’t seem to be any concern of anyone’s but us. The General was going over to Chichester after luncheon to set things up for a fake sailing accident for Uncle Dick, but you rumbled him. And then I knew Harvey was dangerous; I was going to try and warn you but I didn’t realize everything would happen so fast, and I didn’t know what he was up to, or why. But I did know he was up to something, the way he purred over his claret at supper—I just didn’t know what.”

  “What would you have done if you’d realized he’d killed your uncle?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing, probably.”

  “Who took the whiskey out to Mr. Waugh?”

  “I wasn’t in the room, but I met Judith coming back. Harvey’d asked her to take it. I gave her a sleeping pill and sent her up to bed. It’s rather sad, you know, but she wouldn’t have let any of them touch her, not even Harvey. She’s desperately in love in a very old-fashioned way with a rather wet young man who sells software for computers. Poor Harvey, he’s so conscious of his abilities, so frustrated by Uncle Dick’s refusal to let him build this place up into something really big …”

  “I thought it belonged to your father,” said Pibble.

  “The General gave it to him when my mother agreed to marry him—it didn’t belong to either of them then, of course, not until Grandfather died, but they’d had some sort of bet about who’d get her—you know their style. Anyway legally Herryngs belonged to the General, but he always behaved as though it belonged to Uncle Dick, who really hated Old England. And poor Harvey could feel the years dribbling away all the time. He should never have come here, never have married me, but the Raid trapped him, ruined him. It ruined us all.”

  “You, too?” said Pibble.

  “Of course. If you think I’m being very callous and bloody-minded about all this, you’re quite right. Everything that mattered happened so long ago, and then it was all lies. You won’t have noticed it, but there isn’t a picture of my mother anywhere in the place, except one Uncle Dick kept in a drawer, though he never told the General. I’ve never found out what happened in the end—they wouldn’t talk about her. All she wanted was to live on a farm with a few horses, but first, while Grandfather was alive, she had to go bucketing round the world living in horrible­ quarters and taking part in Army wives’ chitchat, which she was terrible­ at, so nobody liked her. Then she came to live here during­ the war. The General was away, mostly, soldiering and quarreling­, but after the Raid he came back forever. I don’t know what happened—I was being finished at a posh nunnery—but she died. She killed herself, I believe, but there was nothing in the papers. It may even have been something worse: I can’t find out. But I know why—the General wasn’t human any more, after the Raid. He had sold his soul, and my mother couldn’t understand. She was the most loving person who ever walked, and the General­ couldn’t love or be loved any more. Anyway, she tried love, and it killed her. That’s why I chose callousness­, and it’s eaten me up. I’m the last of the Claverings, you know—there aren’t any heirs, not even some ghastly Australian. I shall close Old England. I shall let the roof beams rot. I shall mumble about through leaky rooms for fifty years, living on cat food. Oh, Christ!”

  She stared at her face in the mirror over the fireplace, pushing her cheeks upward with the inside of her fingers so that the little crow’s-feet became the deep-etched furrows of old age.

  “I’m going to bed,” she said, “unless there’s anything else you want to ask. I wouldn’t have let him try to kill you if I’d known, Mr. Pibble. You don’t belong here, so we’ve no right. Good night.”

  She swayed out, supple as a child. Pibble gloomed at the fire, trying to make his brain riffle through the day’s events to see whether a card lay there which would betray her. He was sure in his own mind that she had known at dinnertime roughly what her husband was meditating, and that would mean that she knew he had killed the Admiral. But Lady Macbeth is not admissible evidence. When they’d come back from the Tiger Pit, she’d greeted them as though they’d been the General and Singleton back from some exploit, and only noticed halfway through her sentence that the little one was Pibble. But why? How could she have detached herself so from her father, her husband, her uncle, and just let them slaughter each other? With a pricking at his nape Pibble saw a possible answer: if she was the Admiral’s daughter, then … then … it might have come out in some weeping row when the General­ came home for good, and so Lady Clavering died, and the old men had killed her between them—not literally, but morally, at least to a doting daughter. And so poor Harvey became just part of the machinery of revenge, his own tr
emendous financial schemes being nothing beside the high purpose of wiping the blood of the Claverings­ off the face of the earth.

  Never mind. It might be true, but nothing would ever prove it. If it was, she would take vengeance again, on herself. Pibble shivered. His thought processes were becoming very dim; he went over the same point several times before he could bully his brain into moving on. She’d never called him anything except “General,” not once, had she? Yes, once, when she was playing the apologetic hostess after the first attempt at murdering Pibble—and even then she’d stumbled over it. And … and … something else … yes, the General had said she’d been very “cut up” about the Admiral’s death … except that she mostly called him “Uncle Dick” … cozier … and the fierce bad blood between the old heroes—it’d account for that, too … you randy old bastard … these last years Dick and I managed to steer dear of each other’s obsessions … neither of them ever loved anyone else, I think (but that was Miss Finnick—let’s leave her out of this) … Ah, give it up, leave it to whoever comes to take over. He dozed.

  Almost at once something rattled against the window behind him. Two police cars stood out on the gravel; several torches probed the sky in a toy searchlight display; a man was bending in the drive for another handful of gravel to throw. Pibble’s voice was disappearing again, but by signs and painful whispers he got the group to wait and then went around and discovered the door and flight of steps down which the General had strutted a whole afternoon ago. He led his reinforcements back into the study and addressed them. His tiredness and his damaged throat made him sound like the Ass. Com., much more impressive than if he’d been in full possession of his larynx. First a brief jeremiad about what would happen to any officer who was found to have communicated with the press; then a brief assignment of duties—two poor sods to go and guard the Tiger Pit, one to watch in the Chinese Room in case anyone tried to nobble the Colt, two down on the Gallows Ground to prevent the day staff mucking the detail up, one to go through Singleton’s papers and try and warn the agency responsible for tomorrow’s visitors, one on the top landing to guard the Admiral’s quarters and Deakin’s, a car waiting this end, another over at the staff car park. He marked maps (third drawer down on the left) for the outliers, took the house party around to their posts, and went back to his dozing on the study sofa, his ears full of a noise like the mains hum on an old radio.