The Throwback

by Tom Sharpe

  17

  All that day and the next and the one following Mr Taglioni continued his gruesome task while Lockhart cooked and Mr Dodd sat in his shed and stared resentfully at the cucumber frames. In her bedroom Mrs Flawse had stood all she could of her blasted husband’s voice echoing from across the landing about Heaven and Hell and guilt, sin and damnation. If the old fool would either die or stop repeating himself she wouldn’t have minded but he went on and on and on, and by the third night Mrs Flawse was prepared to brave snow, sleet and storm and even heights to escape. She tied her sheets together and then tore her blankets into strips and knotted them to the sheets and the sheets to the bed and finally, donning her warmest clothes, she clambered out of the window and slid rather than climbed to the ground. The night was dark and the snow melted and against the black background of mud and moor she was invisible. She slushed off down the drive towards the bridge and had just crossed it and was trying to undo the gates when behind her she heard the sound that had welcomed her to Flawse Hall, the baying of hounds. They were still in the yard but a light shone in the window that had been her bedroom and the light had been off when she left.

  She turned from the gate and ran or rather stumbled alongside The Cut in a desperate attempt to reach the hillside by the tunnel, and as she ran she heard the creak of the wooden gates to the yard and the louder baying of the hounds. The Flawse pack was on the scent again. Mrs Flawse fled on into the darkness, tripped and fell, got up, tripped again and this time fell into The Cut. It wasn’t deep but the cold was intense. She tried to climb the far bank but slipped back, and giving up, waded on knee-deep in the icy water towards the dark shadow of the hill and the darker hole of the great tunnel. It loomed larger and more awful with each uncertain step she took. Mrs Flawse hesitated. The black hole ahead spoke to her of Hades, the baying pack behind of Pluto, no gay cartoon of Disneyland, but rather that dread god of the infernal regions at whose altar of mere wealth she had unconsciously worshipped. Mrs Flawse was not an educated woman but she knew enough to tell that she was caught between the devil and, by way of taps, toilets and sewers provided by the Gateshead and Newcastle Waterworks, the deep blue sea. And then as she hesitated the baying hounds were halted in their tracks and against the skyline she could see in silhouette a figure on a horse thrashing about him with a whip.

  ‘Get back, ye scum,’ shouted Lockhart, ‘back to your kennels, ye scavengers of hell.’

  His voice drifting with the wind reached Mrs Flawse and for once she felt grateful to her son-in-law. A moment later she knew better. Addressing Mr Dodd as he had addressed the hounds, Lockhart cursed the man for his stupidity.

  ‘Have you forgotten the will, you damned old fool?’ he demanded. ‘Let the old bitch but go one mile beyond the radius of the Hall and she will forfeit the estate. So let her run and be damned.’

  ‘I hadna thought of that,’ said Mr Dodd contritely, and turned his horse to follow the pack back to Flawse Hall while Lockhart rode behind. Mrs Flawse no longer hesitated. She too had forgotten the clause in the will. She would not run and be damned. With a desperate effort she scrambled from The Cut and stumbled back to the Hall. Once there she had not the strength to climb the sheets to her bedroom but tried the door. It was unlocked. She went inside and stood shivering in the darkness. A door was open to the kitchen and a light shone beneath the cellar door. Mrs Flawse needed a drink, a strong drink to warm her blood. She stepped quietly to the cellar door and opened it. A moment later her screams echoed and re-echoed through the house for there before her very eyes, naked and with an enormous scar from groin to gullet, sat old Mr Flawse on a bare wood table stained with blood and his eyes were the eyes of a tiger. Behind him stood Mr Taglioni with a piece of cotton waste which he appeared to be stuffing into her husband’s skull and while he worked he hummed a tune from The Barber of Seville. Mrs Flawse took one look and having screamed passed out. It was Lockhart who carried her gibbering dementedly back to her room and dropped her on the bed. Then he hauled up the sheets and blankets and knotted her to the bedstead.

  ‘Ye’ll go no more a-wandering by the light of the moon,’ he said cheerfully, and went out locking the door. It was true. When Mr Dodd took her breakfast up he found Mrs Flawse staring dementedly at the ceiling, gibbering to herself.

  Down in the cellar Mr Taglioni gibbered too. Mrs Flawse’s eruption and hysteria in the cellar had completed his demoralization. It had been bad enough to stuff a dead man but to have his work interrupted in the middle of the night by a wailing widow had been too much for him.

  ‘Take me home,’ he pleaded with Lockhart, ‘take me home.’

  ‘Not before you’ve finished,’ said Lockhart implacably. ‘He’s got to speak and wave his hands.’

  Mr Taglioni looked up at the masked face.

  ‘Taxidermy’s one thing. Marionettes another,’ he said. ‘You wanted him stuffed, you got him stuffed. Now you say I got to make him speak. What you want? Miracles? You better ask God for those.’

  ‘I’m not asking anyone. I’m telling,’ said Lockhart and produced the loudspeaker. ‘You put that where his larynx is …’

  ‘Was,’ said Mr Taglioni, ‘I no leave nothing inside.’

  ‘Was then,’ continued Lockhart, ‘and then I want this receiver put in his head.’ He showed Mr Taglioni the miniature receiver. Mr Taglioni was adamant.

  ‘No room. His head is stuffed with cotton wool.’

  ‘Well, take some out and put this in and leave space for the batteries. And while you’re about it I want his jaw to move. I’ve an electric motor here. Look, I’ll show you.’

  For the rest of the morning, the late Mr Flawse was wired for sound and by the time they had finished it was possible to hear his heart beat when a switch was pulled. Even his eyes, now those of the tiger, swivelled in his head at the touch of a button on the remote control. About the only thing he couldn’t do was walk or lie down flat. For the rest he looked rather healthier than he had done of late and certainly sounded as articulate.

  ‘Right,’ said Lockhart when they had tested him out, ‘now you can drink your fill.’

  ‘Who?’ said Mr Taglioni, by this time thoroughly confused. ‘Him or me?’

  ‘You,’ said Lockhart and left him to his own devices and the contents of the wine cellar. He went upstairs to find that Mr Dodd was also drunk. The sound of his master’s voice issuing from that fearful effigy in the cellar had been too much even for his sturdy soul and he was halfway through a bottle of his own Northumbrian brew. Lockhart took the whisky from him.

  ‘I’ll need your help to get the old man to bed,’ he said, ‘he’s stiff in the hip joints and needs levering round corners.’

  Mr Dodd demurred but eventually between them they got Mr Flawse, clad in his red flannel nightgown, into bed where he sat up bellowing and calling on the Almighty to save his soul.

  ‘You’ve got to admit he’s very realistic,’ said Lockhart. ‘It is just a pity we didn’t think of taping his utterances earlier.’

  ‘It’s more a pity we ever thought of taping them at all,’ said Mr Dodd drunkenly, ‘and I wish his jaw wouldna go up and down like that. It puts me in mind of a goldfish with asthma.’

  ‘But the eyes are about right,’ said Lockhart. ‘I got them from the tiger.’

  ‘Ye dinna have to tell me,’ said Mr Dodd, and surprisingly broke into Blake. ‘Tiger, tiger burning bright in the forests of the night. What demented hand and eye framed thy awful circuitry?’

  ‘I did,’ said Lockhart proudly, ‘and I’m fixing him a wheelchair so that he can move about the house on his own and I’ll direct it by remote control. That way no one will suspect he isn’t still alive and I’ll have time to see if this Mr Boscombe in Arizona is my father.’

  ‘Boscombe? A Mr Boscombe?’ said Mr Dodd. ‘And for why would you be thinking he was your father?’

  ‘He wrote a great many letters to my mother,’ said Lockhart, and explained how he had got them.

  ‘Ye’l
l be wasting your time ganning after the man,’ said Mr Dodd. ‘Miss Deyntry was right. I recall the little man and he was a poor wee thing that your mither had no time for. You had best look closer home.’

  ‘He’s the only lead I’ve got,’ said Lockhart, ‘unless you can suggest a more likely candidate.’

  Mr Dodd shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you this though. The auld bitch has got wind of what ye’re up to and knows the old man is dead. If ye gan off to America she’ll find a way out of the house to alert Mr Bullstrode. Ye saw what she did the other night. The woman’s desperate dangerous and there’s the Italian down below is a witness to the deed. Ye hadna thought of that.’

  Lockhart pondered a while. ‘I was going to take him back to Manchester,’ he said. ‘He has no idea where he has been.’

  ‘Aye but he’s a fine knowledge of the house and he’s seen our faces,’ said Mr Dodd, ‘and with the woman hollering that the man was stuffed it will take no time for the law to put two and two together.’

  *

  Down in the cellar Mr Taglioni had put far more than two and two together and was drinking himself insensible on crusted port. He sat surrounded by empty bottles proclaiming in garbled tones that he was the finest stuffer in the world. It was not a word he liked to use but his tongue could no longer wrap itself round anything so polysyllabic as taxidermist.

  ‘There he goes again with his blathering and boasting,’ said Mr Dodd as they stood at the top of the cellar steps. ‘The finest stuffer in the world indeed. The word has too many meanings for my liking.’

  Mrs Flawse shared his distaste. Tied to the bed on which she herself had been stuffed by her late stuffed husband Mr Taglioni’s repertoire filled her with dread. Mr Flawse did not help. Mr Dodd had inserted a tape cassette labelled ‘Family History, Findings in’, which thanks to Lockhart’s electronic ingenuity no sooner ended than it rewound itself and repeated its findings ad nauseam. Since the tape was forty-five minutes long and took three to rewind Mrs Flawse was subjected from below to Mr Taglioni’s drunken boasts and from the bedroom across the landing to endless re-runs of the tale of Headman Flawse, Bishop Flawse going to the stake, and a recitation of Minstrel Flawse’s song beneath the gibbet. It was this last which affected her.

  I gan noo wha ma organ’s gan

  When oft I lay abed,

  So rither hang me upside doon

  Than by ma empty head.

  The first stanza was bad enough but the rest were even worse. By the time Mrs Flawse had heard the old man apparently demand fifteen times that Sir Oswald’s arse be prised apart and he be given back his prick because he couldn’t wait for Oswald to die before he had a pee, his widow was in much the same condition. Not that she wanted a prick, but she certainly couldn’t wait much longer to have a pee. And all day Lockhart and Mr Dodd sat out of earshot in the kitchen debating what to do.

  ‘We canna let the Latin go,’ said Mr Dodd. ‘It would be better to dispose of him altogether.’

  But Lockhart’s mind was working along more economical lines. Mr Taglioni’s repeated boast that he was the world’s finest stuffer and the ambiguity of that remark gave him pause for thought. And Mr Dodd’s attitude was strange. His adamant denial that Mr Boscombe in Dry Bones was Miss Flawse’s lover and his own father had been convincing. When Mr Dodd said something it was invariably true. Certainly he didn’t lie to Lockhart – or hadn’t in the past. And now he was stating categorically that the letters were no clue. It was what Miss Deyntry and the old Romany had warned him. ‘Paper and ink will do you no good.’ Lockhart accepted the fact and yet without Mr Boscombe he was without the possibility of finding his father before it was known that his grandfather was dead. Mr Dodd was right on that point. Mrs Flawse knew and knowing would tell as soon as she was released. Her screams rising to a crescendo that drowned even old Mr Flawse’s Family History and Mr Taglioni’s garbled utterances decided Lockhart to go to her relief. By the time he unlocked the bedroom door she was screaming that if she didn’t have a pee soon it was less a question of anyone else dying than of her bursting. Lockhart untied her and she wobbled to the earth closet. When she returned to the kitchen Lockhart had made up his mind.

  ‘I have found my father,’ he announced. Mrs Flawse stared at him with loathing.

  ‘You’re a liar,’ she said, ‘a liar and a murderer. I saw what you had done to your grandfather and don’t think …’

  Lockhart didn’t. Between them he and Mr Dodd dragged Mrs Flawse up to her room and tied her again to the bed. This time they gagged her.

  ‘I told you the auld witch knew too much,’ said Mr Dodd, ‘and since she’s lived for money she’ll not die without it, threaten her how you may.’

  ‘Then we must forestall her,’ said Lockhart, and went down to the cellar. Mr Taglioni, on to his fifth bottle, regarded him hazily through bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Finest taxi … stuffer in the world. Me,’ he burbled, ‘fox, flowl, phleasant, you name it I’ll stuff it. And now I’ve stuffed a man. Whatcha think of that?’

  ‘Daddy,’ said Lockhart, and put his arm round Mr Taglioni’s shoulder affectionately, ‘my own dear daddy.’

  ‘Daddy? Whose flucking daddy?’ said Mr Taglioni, too crook to appreciate the new role he was being cast in. Lockhart helped him to his feet and up the stairs. In the kitchen Mr Dodd was busy at the stove making a pot of coffee. Lockhart propped the taxidermist up against the settle where he tried to focus his eyes on these new and circling surroundings. It took an hour and a pint of black coffee together with a great deal of stew to sober him up. And all the time Lockhart insisted on calling him Daddy. If anything more was needed to unnerve the Italian it was this.

  ‘I’m not your flucking daddy,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Lockhart got up and went to his grandfather’s study and unlocked the safe hidden behind the collected works of Surtees. When he returned he was carrying a wash-leather bag. He beckoned to Mr Taglioni to come to the table and then emptied the bag’s contents out in front of him. A thousand gold sovereigns littered the scrubbed pine table. Mr Taglioni goggled at them.

  ‘What’s all that money doing there?’ he asked. He picked up a sovereign and fingered it. ‘Gold. Pure gold.’

  ‘All for you, Daddy,’ said Lockhart.

  For once Mr Taglioni didn’t question the word. ‘For me? You’re paying me in gold for stuffing a man?’

  But Lockhart shook his head. ‘No, Daddy, for something else.’

  ‘What?’ said the taxidermist suspiciously.

  ‘For being my father,’ said Lockhart. Mr Taglioni’s eyes swivelled in his head almost as incredulously as the tiger’s did in the old man.

  ‘Your father?’ he gasped. ‘You want me to be your father? For why should I be your father? You must have one already.’

  ‘I am a bastard,’ said Lockhart, but Mr Taglioni knew that already.

  ‘So even a bastard must have a father. Your mother was a virgin?’

  ‘You leave my mother out of this,’ said Lockhart, and Mr Dodd shoved a poker into the glowing fire of the range. By the time it was red-hot Mr Taglioni had made up his mind. Lockhart’s alternatives left him little choice.

  ‘OK, I agree. I tell this Mr Bullstrode I am your father. I don’t mind. You pay me this money. Is fine with me. Anything you say.’

  Lockhart said a lot more. They concerned the likely prison sentence to be pronounced on a taxidermist who had stuffed an old man, having in all likelihood first murdered him for the thousand gold sovereigns in his safe.

  ‘I no murdered anyone,’ said Mr Taglioni frantically, ‘you know that. He was dead when I came here.’

  ‘You prove it,’ said Lockhart. ‘Where are his vital organs to be examined by a police surgeon and forensic expert to say when he died?’

  ‘In the cucumber frames,’ said Mr Dodd involuntarily. It was a circumstance that haunted his mind.

  ‘Never mind that,’ said Lockhart, ‘the point I’m making
is that you’ll never be able to prove you didn’t kill my grandfather and this money is the motive. Besides, we don’t like foreigners in these parts. The jury would be biased against you.’

  Mr Taglioni acknowledged that likelihood. Certainly everything else in whatever parts he was seemed to have a bias against him.

  ‘OK, OK. I say what you want me to say,’ he said, ‘and then I go with all this money? Right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Lockhart, ‘you have my word as a gentleman.’

  *

  That night Mr Dodd went to Black Pockrington and, having first collected Miss Deyntry’s car from the old lime kiln, drove to Hexham to inform Mr Bullstrode that he and Dr Magrew were required next day at the Hall to certify the sworn statement of Lockhart’s father that he was indeed responsible for Miss Flawse’s pregnancy. He then returned the car to Divet Hall.

  Lockhart and Mr Taglioni sat on in the kitchen while the Italian learnt his lines. Upstairs Mrs Flawse struggled with her own. She had made up her mind that nothing, not even the prospect of a fortune, was going to keep her lying there in wait for a similar end to that of her husband. Come hell or high water she was going to get loose from the bed and absent from the Hall, and not even the thought of being pursued by the Flawse pack would deter her from making her escape. Unable to express herself vocally because of the gag, she concentrated on the ropes that tied her to the iron bedstead. She pushed her hands down and pulled them back over and over again with a tenacity that was a measure of her fear.

  And in Hexham Mr Bullstrode pertinaciously tried to persuade Dr Magrew to return with him to Flawse Hall the next morning. Dr Magrew was not easily induced. His last visit had had a quite remarkable adverse effect on him.