Death by Sheer Torture

by Robert Barnard

  I left the drawing-room, crossing the gargantuan hall on my way to the Gothic wing where my father and sister, and myself when young, had had their home. But as I passed through the hall my eye was caught by a lectern standing near the door, on which was placed an enormous book well remembered from my childhood: Great-Grandfather Trethowan’s Family Bible. It had always stood, before, in the chapel—now, I presumed, not merely disused but abandoned. I went over and opened it, curiously, for here were entered all the family births, marriages and deaths—things Hamnet would no doubt expect me to have at my fingertips, though in fact of all that had happened in the family over the past thirteen years or so I had merely the haziest of notions, culled from occasional meetings with my sister, or the inevitable newspaper paragraphs.

  So here (in thick black Gothic script) they all were: on the first page JOSIAH BENTHAM TRETHOWAN, 1828-97; his entry the thickest and blackest of all, with details of his marriage and his three children—my grandfather and his two maiden sisters, who spent the first half of their lives ministering to their father’s every wish and whim, and on his death, suitably rewarded, took up their residence in a Mediterranean country, where they lived happily if respectably to a ripe old age, upholding the Protestant religion and fighting cruelty to animals.

  The next page was assigned to my grandfather, CHARLES ALBERT TRETHOWAN, 1870-1946, in much smaller letters. My grandfather, I believe, was an inoffensive, loving man, who tended the family fortune as best he could and devoted himself to his wife, his duties as magistrate, and his garden. He married Charlotte Victoria Matcham, 1877-1939, the daughter of a Yorkshire baronet. She was a gay, witty creature—as a hostess much loved by Edwardian society and on several occasions by King Edward himself. Her husband doted on her, obeyed her every whim, and turned a gallant blind eye when necessary. She loved children, but mainly, it was said, when they were little: she tended, I believe, to lose interest when they were six or seven. A psychiatrist might make something of this to explain the family. I’ll leave you to do your own diagnoses. The offspring of this marriage were: ELIZABETH ALEXANDRA, 1898-1955; LAWRENCE EDGAR, 1900- ; SYBILLA JANE, 1905- ; CATHERINE SIEGLINDE, 1908- ; and LEO VICTOR, 1911- . The date of my father’s death had not yet been inserted, but no doubt Sybilla, with the zeal of the survivor, was already scrabbling around for the printer’s ink.

  From now on one got a page to oneself only if one produced offspring. Aunt Eliza, for all her honours and talents, missed out. On Lawrence’s page, however, it was recorded that he married first in 1918 Florence Emily Horsthorne, 1901–34, and produced a son, Wallace Abercrombie Trethowan, born 1919, missing, presumed dead 1944. And, second, in 1946, Lily Beatrice Cowper, born 1920, divorced 1954, by whom he had issue Peter Clement Trethowan, born 1947. My cousin Pete. Lawrence’s page also recorded worldly honours—his election to the Royal Society of Literature, his knighthood (both ludicrous but very British elevations).

  My Aunt Syb’s page was shorter. It recorded her marriage in 1936, her divorce in 1942, and the sole offspring, Mordred Winston Foley, born 1941. My cousin Morrie. The page also recorded the most notable of her theatrical works.

  My father’s page recorded his marriage in 1945 to Virginia Godrich, and her death in 1958. You will observe that he was already in his mid-thirties by the time of his marriage, and you may like to connect this marriage with Lawrence’s loss of an heir in 1944. My father, naturally, denied any connection, and claimed that my sister and myself were not afterthoughts but long-delayed intentions. In any case, as you will have seen, Lawrence stole a march on him by marrying in the following year and producing a replacement heir before he did. Anyway, my birth was recorded, Peregrine Leo, 1948- and that of my sister, Cristobel, 1951- , but I did not get a page to myself on which my marriage was recorded, or the birth of our son. I did not expect it: I had not, as you may say, paid my subscription. My father’s page also recorded two or three of his less unsuccessful musical works, and the fact that he had served on the Arts Council Music Panel, 1958-60. Wowee!

  My Aunt Kate got no page to herself: she had never married, nor ever done anything with her life except make a fool of herself before one hundred thousand people at Nuremberg in 1938. The last page belonged to my cousin Peter, Lawrence’s heir, recording his marriage to Maria-Luisa Gomez da Silva, and the birth of children Pietro 1971, Elena 1973, Mario 1975, Alessandro 1976, and Emilia 1978. My God! I thought. And all done in singles!

  I closed the bible and went on my way, down the gloomy wide corridors hung with portraits and occasional etchings of industrial England in my great-grandfather’s time (Hepplethwaite’s Mill, Preston, 1854, and the like). Finally I reached the door that opened into the Gothic wing of Harpenden—my father’s wing, my once and nevermore home.

  I had figured out already which room my father was likely to have used for his ‘experiments’—the high-ceilinged sitting-room on the ground floor. Ideal for the purpose, and much too large for him and Cristobel alone—no doubt they had moved their living quarters up to the first floor. I needn’t have bothered figuring this out, for the entrance to the whole wing was guarded—by, happy memory, PC Smith, of my childish apple-stealing days; still PC Smith, but heavier and slower.

  ‘You can’t come in here, sir, not unless you’re sent for. Special,’ he intoned, looking immensely complacent. I showed him my card. ‘Oh, sorry sir, Mr Perry, isn’t it? Well, well . . . sir. I wouldn’t ever have believed . . . The Superintendent is expecting you. In the old sitting-room. Straight through there, sir. But you’ll remember the way, I s’pose.’

  Yes. I remembered the way. I thanked him, and marched in.

  My father, of course, had long since been taken down and hauled off to the morgue, so you will be spared horrific descriptions of purple faces and . . . well, do it yourself, if you fancy that kind of thing. All I saw was a splendid array of ropes, belts, pulleys and hooks—rather like something out of a museum of early industrial objects. There were other things in the room, whose nature I could only guess at, but it was the strappado which caught my eye and dominated the room. Standing by the apparatus, pensively, looking in urgent need of recourse to Varieties of Sexual Experience, or some such tome, was my colleague Superintendent Hamnet, Tim.

  ‘Hello, Tim,’ I said.

  ‘Perry!’ The relief and welcome which lit up his face were immediately replaced by professional sympathy: ‘I say, old boy, I really am sorry.’

  ‘So am I,’ I said. ‘I don’t expect I’ll ever recover from it.’

  He lost the expression at once, and looked suspicious. ‘But I thought you weren’t close?’

  ‘We weren’t. I’m not talking about the death of my father. I’m talking about my professional reputation.’ I began expatiating aggrievedly on a theme which had been nagging at me all the way up on the train. ‘Do you realize, Tim, that whatever I may do in the future: if I save the President of the US from a bomb attack, catch a whole posse of Mafia hit men, wipe out the international drug traffic, banish hard porn and soft porn and four-letter words from our streets—still when I retire everyone in the force is going to say: “That was old Perry Trethowan: it was his Dad who got done in while he was practising medieval tortures in chorus-girl’s tights”. And they’ll guffaw, or snigger, or hide their grins behind their hands, depending on the type of chap they are. That’s me, fixed, for all eternity.’

  Tim Hamnet was an honest man, so he didn’t attempt to argue with me.

  ‘Well, as I say, I’m deeply sorry,’ he said. ‘Bit of a facer, I can see that. Best thing for all of us is if we can get it all over and done with as soon as possible, eh? The Chief mapped out your role, I suppose?’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘Our conversation was brief.’

  ‘Naturally all the heavy stuff I’ll be doing myself,’ said Tim. ‘All the interviews, the on-the-spot stuff, getting the lab reports. And of course I’ll keep you informed about that. All we wanted you to do really was—well, ingratiate yourself with this lot—sorry, with
your family, get their confidence, nose out all the background stuff, the little family tensions and so on —’

  ‘All you want me to do!’ I expostulated. ‘I tell you, in comparison infiltrating all the rival Middle East freedom fighters would be a piece of cake. But I’ll do what I can. I’ve made the first hurdle: I’m invited to stay for the funeral.’

  ‘I took that for granted,’ said Tim.

  ‘You shouldn’t have. Take nothing for granted with this family. It never does the conventional, as a matter of principle. Well, you’d better give me the basic low-down.’

  As I said it, I sighed, and Tim himself gave a grimace of distaste. He turned back to the apparatus that dominated the room.

  ‘Well, this, as you’ll have gathered, is a sort of do-it-yourself strappado. Know anything about strappado?’

  ‘I’ve educated myself since Joe called,’ I said. ‘It’s a Spanish Inquisition torture, still used by a few enlightened governments as late as the last century. Not that we can afford to feel superior these days, I suppose. Anyway, what you did was you strapped the bloke up by the wrists, usually tied behind his back, you drew him up to the ceiling, then either you left him, or—the real refinement—let him down with a great big wallop till he nearly hit the floor, practically wrenching his arms out of their sockets in the process. If he was unwilling to recant his heresies, or shop his liberal friends, you repeated the process, ad nauseam or, as in this case, ad mortem.’ I paused. ‘Poor old bugger. Still, you can’t say he didn’t bring it on himself.’

  Tim tried hard to be tactful about the whole business. ‘Did you . . . did you know he went in for this kind of thing?’

  ‘I don’t think it had gone anything like as far as this while I was around. It was mostly books then, I think. I remember once having lunch with him in Soho, and after lunch as we were walking along he plunged into a dingy little bookshop and came out with a parcel in plain brown paper. We were on the way to a matinée of Peter Pan at the time.’

  ‘He doesn’t sound such a bad old buffer.’

  ‘He just wanted to see Captain Hook. Anyway, when he went for the raspberry fizz at the interval I opened the package. It was a book called Secrets of the Torture Chamber. Vividly illustrated. I had dreams about those illustrations for months afterwards. I’ve been against third-degree methods ever since. I later found he had a whole shelf of them: histories of the Inquisition, books on the birch, the cat. Most of them were presented as serious social histories, with frequent implied tut-tuts. The hypocrisy was almost as nasty as the practices described. I suppose it had to be presented in that way then. Nowadays you can probably get much the same info in any number of the Beano.’

  ‘So he’d only taken up with this sort of experiment in the last few years?’

  ‘So my Aunt Sybilla tells me.’

  ‘Hardly a very wise recreation for a man of seventy.’

  ‘You said it. Still, pensioners get some funny ideas, and my papa was a bundle of nothing but. Come on, show me how the thing works.’

  ‘Well,’ said Tim Hamnet, going over to a pair of heavy leather wristguards on the end of two strong ropes. ‘The first thing is to strap your arms into this, right? Not altogether easy if you’re on your own, but these were no doubt designed specially and it’s perfectly possible—I did it myself a minute or two ago. Your dad at least had the sense not to tie his hands behind his back first. Now, once you’ve done that, you can start the motor with your foot.’

  He flicked the switch of the motor on the floor, then walked two paces away and grabbed hold of the heavy wristlets. The apparatus of ropes and belts moved slowly but inexorably, and gradually Tim was lifted, inch by inch, to the high ceiling, the weights on the other ends of the ropes being aided by the power-driven belts from the motor. When Tim was hanging full-length at the highest point there was a pause of about a minute. Then, as the machine momentarily cut out, Tim’s weight immediately exceeded that of the balancing weights and he plunged to earth—but, letting go of the wristlets halfway, he landed nimbly on the floor.

  ‘Christ, be careful, Tim. I never knew you were a gymnast.’

  ‘No harm done. I tried that out before you came. But I wouldn’t want to do it too often. Now—see the position of the wristlets now? Seven feet or so from the floor. Your father was a smaller man than you, Perry. His feet didn’t quite touch the floor, however nasty the wrench he’d given himself. Hear that machine? It’s starting off again. We’re going through the whole process again. Now—note that when he’s dangling, he can’t switch the machine off with his foot. The only way to do that is when you’re up at the ceiling—with that —’

  He pointed to a white cord, which should have stretched from the on-off switch on the motor to a pulley in the ceiling.

  ‘He could pull that when he was at the top, and he’d just be given one last bump.’

  ‘Bloody daft idea!’ I said. ‘Practically inviting himself to have one more than he ought.’

  ‘Not entirely daft, though,’ said Tim. ‘Since it was operated by the hand it was probably more reliable than something operated by the foot. Except that —’

  And he pointed to what I already could hardly fail to have noticed: the cord from the ceiling had been neatly cut, and was dangling free. The other end trailed like a dead snake across the floor. I went over.

  ‘Boffins finished?’ I asked.

  Tim nodded. I took the cut ends and brought them together. It had been sliced at a height of two feet or so from the floor. I looked at the ends: the cord was depressed into the centre, as if cut with scissors rather than a knife. I looked up again at the apparatus of belts and weights, and at the sturdy little motor.

  ‘It’s homemade,’ said Hamnet.

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘I thought he might have picked it up at Harrods toy department.’

  ‘Tell me, Perry, what sort of chap was your father?’

  ‘I suppose you mean apart from the sado-masochistic cum transvestite kinks he had?’ I rested my foot on the little motor, and thought for a bit. ‘Well, first of all, he was a very, very minor composer—so minor as to be virtually an amateur. I’ll tell you what I think: he was the youngest, and I think he looked at the elder ones in the family, found we’d already got two artists and a writer and decided a composer was all there was left to be.’

  This idea had first come to me as a boy, in the school holidays. HMV had just issued, with British Council support, an LP of my father’s song-cycle Dolores, to words by Swinburne. Despite the best efforts of Alexander Young and a group of chamber musicians, it had received lukewarm reviews. But my father was delighted with it, absolutely chuffed. Listening to it, perforce, over and over again, I decided first, that my father had no feeling for words, then that he had no aptitude for music either.

  Anyway, I gave Tim a run-through of my father’s career, which necessarily touched at several points on the careers and fame of the family as a whole. I mentioned their first scandalous success in 1929: it was called The Somme, and it was a sort of mixture of words, music, décor and scenic effects to which they all contributed. The intention was to lampoon the leaders of the First World War and crucify them for their conduct of it—by then hardly a new theme. But the way they did it was certainly novel: my Aunt Eliza painted some scarifying murals for the Wigmore Hall, which remained spotlit throughout; Sybilla organized some terrifying battle effects; my father (still in his teens, and at the Guildhall School) provided satirical settings of patriotic poems by Brooke and Julian Grenfell; Lawrence read his own poems from the ceiling (as if he were one of the better, dead, First World War poets). The newspapers loved it, and them: they were copy, to be applauded or pelted with journalistic mud. They went on loving them through the ’thirties, when they threw a succession of bohemian house-parties (my grandfather presiding benevolently, if bewilderedly) and put on two more examples of what I suppose today would be called ‘total theatre’. Though their reputations waned, as far as the newspapers were concerned thei
r star never entirely faded. Lawrence produced nothing of interest after the Second World War, Aunt Sybilla went into acidulated retirement, Aunt Eliza (admittedly still at the height of her powers) died in 1955.

  Meanwhile my father never recovered from being an infant prodigy. His Stravinskyish settings of Brooke were followed by works derivative of other composers. I think he is seen at his best in his incidental music for a revival of Wilde’s Salome, starring some ’thirties vamp whose name I have forgotten. True, he challenged Richard Strauss on his own ground, and was resoundingly beaten, but still, there was something in the subject that brought out the best of his meagre talents. And that something was something really very nasty. But this merely relative failure was no more than a flash in the pan. Of recent years he had produced nothing much at all: the last I heard of was a Hymn of Tribute on the occasion of the Silver Jubilee—it was commissioned by nobody and as far as I know played by nobody either, so the Monarch was spared.

  All this I told Tim Hamnet.

  ‘That’s very interesting—’ he said.

  ‘Liar. It’s the pathetic record of a ninth-rate talent.’

  ‘—but what I really wanted was some idea of his . . . his personality. What sort of chap he was.’

  ‘He was a snivelling little scrap of humanity, without a generous bone in his body. He was jealous of other people’s success, always wanting to make a splash in the world but lacking the talent, guts and perseverence needed to achieve anything. He was a bad husband, a bad father and a frightful composer. Anything else?’

  ‘I won’t come to you next time I need a reference,’ said Tim, who looked genuinely shocked. ‘If I were you, Perry, I wouldn’t go around saying that kind of thing.’

  ‘Why not? I was at a lecture on “The Use and Abuse of the Laws on Sus” last night—at Scotland Yard, surrounded by policemen. I don’t have a twin and it wasn’t my double—doubles don’t come easy at six feet five and seventeen stone. I talked to at least twelve people I know well and went for a pint with them afterwards. If you know of a better alibi, I don’t.’